Children of the blue sky
by SarahBelle
Summary: In the years before the War of the Ring, the way of life around the Sea of Rhûn is constantly threatened by the One of the South. Five women, marked by the scars of war, do their best to protect their beliefs and hand down their stories to their daughter.
1. My mother's story

**Disclaimer: I do not own J.R.R Tolkein's work.**

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My mother's story, and so in turn my story, starts with the day that she was chosen to go to the West, in her fifteenth year. Before that time she had lived much as I lived, a dull safe life, and so she had never seen the need to tell it to me. The time that came after the safety was grimmer but exciting, and so this is where her story, as she told it, always began.

Orders had come from the West, from the One of the South Himself who had set up residence there, demanding young men as soldiers, and my mother's tribe was one of the first that the decree reached, set as it was in the hills on the Eastern shore of the Sea of Rhûn. And of course where the young men went some young women were always chosen to follow them, though never to fight, for as in many other parts of Middle-Earth the women of Rhûn did not go into battle alongside their husbands. The ones who were chosen were girls whose mothers wept but whose fathers were willing to give them up because they were too expensive to keep, because the family did not have enough for yet another dowry, because they were rebellious, because they were too ugly to ever marry. More girls than could be fed were a burden in the desert, even near the sea as they were, and the families who cared less were only too glad to be rid of them.

But Rookheeya, which means _running-water_, was not poor or headstrong or unloved or ugly. She was quite beautiful, really; even in a land where such a trait did not last long she carried much of her beauty with her into old age. Her eyes were lighter than others and her skin was the colour of the wild honey that could found in the rocks and caves, and the sheen of her hair was like gold, a sight that is common in the desert but rare in the colouring of its people, though it was seldom seen beneath her headscarf by anyone but me. It was not even her height that settled the decision of the people to sell her, though she was half a head taller than many of the women and as tall as most of the men. It was that she had no one who could speak for her: she had no mother to weep over her fate, for the woman who named her for her gurgling laugh as a baby had died before she had begun to bleed each moon and cover her head, and her father had succumbed to a wasting illness a few months after her sister Bilhah's wedding. Bilhah herself, dark as her sister was fair, fat with her second child and only a year older than Rookheeya, could do nothing to help; her husband had little standing in their tribe and no claim of ownership on Rookheeya to protect her from those eager to send her away to satisfy the troops.

And so Bilhah could only embrace her sister for one last time and sob into her husband's shoulder, as Rookheeya was marched away with the other chosen girls. Many women cried that day, whether truly or only in act, but my mother was not one of them. As far as I know, she never shed one tear as she was taken away from her home.

"I would not cry, because I swore that I would come back," she told me many years later. "I swore to my sister and my brother by marriage as I bade them farewell that I would come back. And I meant to keep that promise. I saw no reason to weep, because I was certain that I would see them again." And so she did not look back in sorrow as the other maidens did when the village disappeared behind the hills of rock, and kept her eyes only on her sandals and the sand that blew over her feet as she marched. All of the women were obliged to walk for that whole long journey, for the horses that the troop had were to be ridden only by the most important of the men.

It soon became clear to the girls why they were being taken along, for the men wished for bed mates both on their journey and when they reached wherever it was that they were to be sent. Many of the maidens that had been given to the troop refused the advances of the soldiers and so were taken by force, but Rookheeya was not among that unhappy number. My mother, wise woman that she was, had no daydreams about keeping herself pure so that she might escape back to her tribe and make an honourable marriage, and she felt that if she was to lose her maidenhead she would at least lose it on her own terms. And so she spread her legs where the others kept theirs closed, and so by submitting to the men she ensured her own survival.

"Because I never refused, I was hardly ever beaten," she would tell me, in the long hot afternoons when we rocked the narrow-necked jars and strained the water from goat curd. "I got good food, better than I would have had if my obedience had been thrashed into me. They were gentle with me, or as gentle as such men can be. It was enough. I never had cause to cry when I was taken, for it only hurt for a moment the first time, but I never found much pleasure in it either. Pleasure in coupling is solely for the men."

The company made their journey slowly around the Sea of Rhûn, picking their way through the foothills on the Western shore, and when they were clear they marched across wilder-land for many days and nights. The ground, though no longer covered in a carpet of hot sand, caused blisters to rise upon the delicate feet of the women again and again until the skin hardened, but still the poor bruised, tired things were pressed on, weeping for the homeland that was left further and further behind them. Still my mother did not weep; she took her mind off her pain and sorrow by watching the lie of the land around her as they passed through it, noting any possible landmark. Her memories of that time and the tales of that march would prove of great use later on, little though she knew it at the time.

She watched her companions as well, and later she would describe them to me as she had described the land. There was Werru, poor little Werru who had only been twelve when she had left the tribe, and was taken by the men at her first blood despite her efforts to hide it and save herself from rape, a girl who would sob in the night. There were Inna and Benti, twin sisters who would have been sold as concubines if their father had not found another use for them, one with curly hair and one with straight who rarely spoke to anyone but each other. There was Ishara, the oldest of all the girls at eighteen, who had been married but had been rejected by her husband when it emerged that her courses had never come and she was barren. Tuki told songs and stories to keep the spirits of the women as high as she could, stories that my mother would remember to tell to me, and Huna would entertain the men by falling to the ground at times and biting and kicking them savagely whenever they came to her and baited the demon in her, froth boiling from her mouth, though Rookheeya always believed that she was ill more than anything else. It took a brave man to bed her, though in their turn all the girls were taken; some willingly and some less so.

After that they turned more to the South and travelled through lands as brown as their name, until they came to the river called Anduin. They followed it until the greenery on the horizon told them that their journey was nearly at an end. It was nightfall when they entered between the trees of the forest rightly call Mirkwood, and came at length to the great stronghold of the One of the South, that many at that time called the Necromancer, that place that the foes of the One named Dol Guldur.

Once there, the girls who were no longer maidens were set to work at once, some to mend ruined garments, some to melt oil for the many lamps that flamed through the shadowy citadel, some to wipe floors and some unfortunate few to strip hides for tanning or to clean instruments of torture – for the stronghold was not only a seat of power, it was also a dungeon from which few escaped. Many prisoners were kept there, Men and the short grown beings called Dwarves, deep in the inner ranks of the stronghold, near to where the One of the South dwelt in full darkness.

Fortune was with my mother, for it was rare that she had to go to such a place since it was her task to help cook food for the many soldiers and prisoners, and on occasion to serve that food to the Men that served the One and to the beings that our people called the 'shadowed ones', the servants of the One who could not bear to walk in the light of the Sun and needs must hide in darkness during the day. Rookheeya never called them anything other than creatures, and she never hid her disgust for them whenever she talked of them, which was not often. She would sometimes allow me to pass my hands over the scars on her arms and back from where they had flicked their whips at her in cruel fun as she hurriedly passed them, though she was certainly never beaten as badly as some of the poor captives held there at the Necromancer's pleasure. By keeping her head down and keeping quiet she avoided their attention, and her loveliness did not draw them as it drew the men. The creatures had no love for beauty, and would have marred it if they could, which was why many girls were often lashed across the face in spite – but not my mother. Not she. She was determined to survive, by any means.

By the time the troop had reached the stronghold Rookheeya had lain with many of the men, and in the months that would follow she was to lie with many more, Men of the East and Men of the South alike. "They were all the same, after a while. It was like tending dogs. Sometimes they would bite, sometimes they would be desperate to rut, and sometimes they were just too sleepy." When she spoke of those times to me or to my aunt or to anyone else, my mother never showed the least bit of shame nor betrayed any desire for any pity that might be shown. "I take no pride in my actions, but I do not regret them," she would sometimes say. "If I had not done as I did, I would have lived only a few weeks in that dank pit."

"Most of the other girls called me whore or slut," she confessed to me as she braided my hair, speaking words I was too young to hear, "but I was not hurt too much by sharing beds and I had enough to eat and some water to wash in at times and to wash my hair, and so I was satisfied. A few of the others were doing the same as I, and we were better off for it. In that hole in the forest where the Sun never came and the air was filled with the screams of those who were being tortured, if you didn't have enough food you did not last long. Good gods, it was a poisonous place. Those who refused to change their ways did not survive; they died like flowers in the high heat. And we knew," she went on, as she tugged on my hair, "we knew it was better than bedding the creatures, at least."

The same poison that struck down her fellows also seemed to kill the babes that formed in her womb. Three times during her imprisonment there her belly had begun to swell, since she had no way of stopping the seed of the men from taking root within her, and then it would flatten again as blood washed away what hopes she might have had, though she probably would have drowned her infants if she had carried them full term rather than let them see with their innocent eyes the horror in which she lived. And even as she was recovering from her third miscarriage she was ordered to prepare meals for a new prisoner who had been brought in and to carry them to his cell. Filled with pain and barely able to walk, she did as she was told; plugging herself with rags to quell the bleeding she made her way along dim stone passages with dry meat and dry bread and thin soup, at last reaching the right alcove in the right wall and peering in at the one who was to receive these meagre rations.

"At first I could hardly see him. But then the torches in those parts of the dungeons were terrible, and so I could hardly see the face of anyone, man or creature alike. And as my eyes grew used to the light I was able to make out his dirty torn blue robes and how loosely they hung upon him; I could see, even though he was slumped against the far wall, that he was very tall, perhaps taller even than me, though I was never to see him stand so that I could measure his height. His long dark beard was matted and there were cuts and scratches on his face and one of his eyes was closed with a bruise; his nose looked like a hawk's beak that had been broken and his breath came heavy and guttural. I doubted that he could actually see me or the guard who stood outside his cell.

"The man shouted out to him that there was food, but he made no reply. I doubted that he could hear either of us as well. Two or three times the guard called, using our own tongue and the Southron language and even, with a struggle, the words of the common tongue of the West, but each time the prisoner was silent. Finally he grew impatient, and opened the door with his key and shoved me through, telling me to go and give the food to him and then come away; he did not do it himself, of course, for the man might be violent and a guard was still more important than a maid. I thought evil thoughts at him as I made my way across the grimy floor, to crouch not too close to the huddled shape over by the wall.

"I told him quietly that I had brought him food, in our own tongue for I had little enough of the other languages I had heard in that pit; I had mostly learned names for parts of the body and little else. Perhaps there was something in my voice which was absent from that of the guard which made him look straight at me at last, with an eye that was huge and shining brown, and made him try to force his face into a smile that looked quite painful. It was pleasant, I think, for him to hear a voice that did not scream or shout, and to see a person who did not threaten him. And I think that it was pleasant, too, for him to see a fair face, for I knew that my looks, though they might have wilted, had not yet been faded by the work I was forced to do both day and night.

"But still he did not speak, and when I took my chances and edged a little closer he only shook his head slowly and fumbled weakly with his hands, to show me what I had not seen from the doorway; that he was too weak even to feed himself.

"So I fed him. First I spooned the soup into his mouth as you would do for an infant or a sick person, and then I tore the dry bread apart with my fingers and softened it in the watery remnants left in the bowl and slipped them between his lips. He was able to chew and swallow most of them, though it took him some time with each mouthful and once he choked and I had to hit his back so that the mess came out in a splatter on the floor. But at last the bread was gone, and then we started on the meat. That was the hardest, I think, for I could not soften it for him save by chewing the strips before I gave them to him one at a time, and he would still have to chew them himself for ever so long before he could swallow, and the guard outside was getting more and more impatient. If it were not for me he would probably have refused the meat outright, but for my sake he continued to chew and swallow, however painful or tiring it might have been.

"When at last we were done he thanked me – for the meal itself or for helping him to eat it, I don't know. He simply said, 'I thank you,' in our tongue, and then he curled up and fell asleep as easy as does a child, and he didn't wake again even when the guard slammed open the cell door in anger and yelled at me to come out at once. I gathered up the bowl and the tray and made my way out of the cell without a word; I was so confused. I had never heard a voice like his. I don't know how I could describe it; I don't think that I could, even now, so many years later. But I heard his voice, and what was more I heard it thanking me. No being, man or woman or creature, had shown gratitude towards me since I had been brought to that dreadful place. Now one man, one prisoner, had been grateful for what I had done, however small a service it was, and for perhaps the first time in that dank hole my heart lifted."

Rookheeya would bring food to this same prisoner for the next two months. As far as she knew he was only given one meal a day, and it was plain as time went on that he was being tortured most brutally in the spaces between her visits to the cell, for the number of cuts grew with each visit and his wounded eye was now useless and blind. She took to bringing with her a healing salve she had stolen from the garments of one who had shared her bed, which she would smear over his many wounds when she was certain that the guard was not looking. They exchanged few words, those two, but it was enough to them. What would they have said, in any case, with a soldier outside the door listening to their every word? She served the ones who kept him imprisoned and who tortured him, and that was all that had brought them together. But she always said to me that something more than that kept them together.

My mother always professed that she loved only three men in her life: her father, her brother who had died before he was fourteen, and Bilhah's husband Rodren. But when she spoke of her visits to the man in blue and her eyes would fix on her hands as they moved over each other so deftly in whatever she was doing, sewing or spinning or cooking, I would think that she lied to save herself. Love is far more than giving your body to someone; love is giving your life to them – and though Rookheeya proclaimed her distaste for men in general for as long as I knew her, perhaps it was because the only man she could ever have married was beyond her reach forever.

It was in the second month that Rookheeya conceived yet again, for she was still serving the soldiers in their beds as she served the captive his food, and once more the knowledge of life within her brought her low. The seventh morning after her moon blood had failed to come she walked in sorrow to the alcove in the wall, certain of the burden she once more carried, and when she was permitted to enter she did not meet the man's eyes as she squatted before him.

I can still remember her words of what happened next, for I asked her to tell me this story again and again because I loved it so.

"I was so ashamed," she would always begin. "I knew that I would not carry this child for long, and it was dreadful for me to know that it would die inside me. It is a terrible thing, to have something that should be safe inside you die, and a horror that I pray you will never know. The pain never grows less, not if you live for a hundred years. I could not look at him; I knew that he was more wounded and in far more pain than I was, but in my selfishness and my sorrow I thought that no pain could be as great as mine. I handed his food to him and did not let my flesh touch his; I wished only to be out of there.

"And then he astonished me; he purposefully reached out and touched my hand. He had never done that before. I was so startled that I could not help but look at him, and I was caught in his shining eye, his only eye now. There was wonder there and such gentleness as I could hardly remember seeing in the face of anyone any longer.

"'Why are you sorrowful?' he asked me. 'You are carrying a girl.'

"I did not know how he could know of my secret. All I knew was that I had been laid bare and open in a manner that defied even the cruelty of the creatures that tormented his fellows, and I hated him for that moment. But I did not let my hatred show. I took my hand away from his and my eyes away from his, and I stared down at the food I had brought him as I spoke, loathing the words that escaped me. 'Then she will die before she is born, as the others did before her again and again; and I will die with her, for I am nearly dead from miscarrying.'

"He said nothing in reply. Perhaps he could think of nothing to say. I took the bowl from the tray and held it out to his lips for him to drink from. But because I kept my eyes on my knees as I did so I did not see what he did with the hand that had touched mine, and so when I felt his touch upon my stomach I nearly cried out, and I dropped the bowl and the soup fell onto his sleeve and his fingers tightened on the flesh beneath my garment. I had felt the touch of many men before that time, on my breasts and neck and back, up and down my legs and between them, on perhaps every part of my body. I was no stranger to the feel of a man's fingers, but the heat of that dry hand on my still flat belly felt far more intimate than any of those times. It was as if he saw beyond me, through my dress and through my skin and flesh, deep into my body where you lay, growing. And for that time it was as if you reached out to greet him, young and unknowing as you were, and I sat there and watched it all. I saw the light grow in his eye and, I swear, I felt my belly grow warm, warmer under his hand than it should have done. I felt strength within me, and new life, and the feeling stayed with me even when he took his hand away at last, and the light did not die from his open eye.

"'I think that you will both live,' was all that he said, and he did not speak another word as I tore up his bread and meat for him. It was as if he no longer needed to speak, that his days of talking were over and done, as if what life was in him had gone into the babe that slept within me, into you. When he had finished eating, I in turn did something I had never done before, to him or to any man. I blessed him: I ran my finger down his forehead and his broken hawk's beak of a nose and I whispered words of peace and joy to him. I told him that the gods and goddesses looked favourably on him and would not abandon him, and he seemed pleased by those words, for he sighed happily. I looked over my shoulder as I left the cell, and I could see by the smile that was still upon his face and the light that was still in his one eye that he was ready to die, that he need do nothing else in this lifetime. The thought both pleased me and hurt me deeply, for I knew that while he was able to escape I was to be left behind, and now without a friend in the whole stronghold."

The news came the next day that the man in blue had died under torture. Rookheeya wept for the one whose name she did not know as she had never wept for her unborn children, but she did not let her grief consume her. She had been given a precious gift, she knew, as she felt life beginning to stir in her and as I began to grow. The man's last words to her had been correct; this child would live, she knew. She did her tasks in silence, and for the first time she refused the advances of the men to share her bed. She professed that she felt a sickness within her that was best not shared, but in truth she wanted nothing more than to keep me, her daughter, safe and untouched by the foulness of any man. She did not even know who the one who had sired me was, but that was no matter to her. She began, again for the first time, to make plans for our escape, for she had no desire to bring me into such a world as she was surrounded by. Schemes came and went as her belly slowly, almost cautiously, began to swell and continued to swell against her garment.

But in the end she did not need to carry out any of her plans, for soon the men and creatures were running out to fight, and the few women hid in corners and prayed to the gods to save them from yet another doom that waited outside the stronghold. Rookheeya sat under a table in the filthy kitchens and hugged herself, and waited for an end to come to the fighting, though not to her or her child. She could not believe that we would die; she would not believe that we could. As the sounds of battle echoed overhead she hoped that the ones attacking the place would win and that they would let her see the Sun again.

It was only when she heard the rumble of falling walls above her that she knew she must get out of the stronghold, now, or perish. She made her way up the passages at a slow run, and still she did not pray to the gods, feeling that they had other prayers to attend to. She trusted to the words of the man in blue. She climbed the rising stairs, and when she found that they had been blocked with stone by the defenders she crawled over the rocks, through dust and grit and the blood that came from the scratches on her skin, and reached for the hole of blue sky she saw above her.

"When I fought my way out of the hole at last, what a sight I saw! I would never forget that day if I live to be a hundred. There were many trees, many dark trees casting shadows upon the ground. There were long-lifes, so beautiful they were, and more than I could count, and they fired arrows that seemed to blot out the Sun. The Sun! It shone down upon their heads and made them gleam with dappled light, so that they looked like the spirits that fly high above in the heavens. I heard screams as some were hit by answering arrows and I saw them fall, but I could also see the walls of the stronghold from where I lay, and as I watched I saw that they were being stormed.

"And then I saw a figure in grey leading more of the long-lifes forward, and shining figures alongside him. They glowed so brightly that they hurt my eyes. The figure in grey held up a staff and pointed it at the walls, and then…oh, it is hard to describe. Then it felt as if a shadow was lifted from the place, and the poison that claimed the lives of so many was gone, all at once. And then there was a cheer from the walls. The fortress was taken; the long-lifes had won. I thought that in the confusion I might be able to escape, but even as I struggled out of the hole some of them saw me and ran over to take hold of me.

"I feared that they would take me prisoner or even rape me and I made to run away, but they ran so fast that they soon overtook me and laid hold of me. They led me, one each holding my arms, down the face of the rock and past many bodies. I saw the faces of men I had lain with, now dead in the dust, and many dead creatures. I was brought before the figure in grey where it was resting, and I saw that it was an old man in grey robes. He asked me in our tongue who I was and why I was there, and when he heard that I was a slave girl brought along by the Men of the East he said that I was no longer a slave and was free to go, though he looked at me the whole while in curiosity, as if I were a riddle he must decipher. But then he spoke to the long-lifes and they led me away, and I saw him no more.

"The long-lifes were gentle to me, and they brought together all the survivors that they found when they searched the stronghold. The men they kept prisoner, but the few of us women that had lived, Ishara, Benti, Inna, Werru and I they led to the edge of the great forest, giving us food and water enough for the journey home and pointing us in the right direction. And so those of us who had come from our tribe set off. That journey was the longest time of my life, longer even than the months in the stronghold. I hated going on, and I hated stopping, I hated my food and I hated not having any food; at time I even hated my companions, but I also needed them and loved them. We kept together, for we knew that if we separated we perished; we helped each other to walk and to live. Even so, in wilder-land we scraped out a grave for one of us along the way: Inna. She had survived with her twin for so long and had seen the Sun again after the shadows, only to die under the hot gaze. We buried Benti's heart with her sister; she would never be the same again after that, as if some part of her had truly gone into the ground, dead. There were times when I was so weary that I thought of lying down and never rising again. But I did not think such thoughts for long at all. I wanted to live, for me and for you and for the one who had given life to both of us. I had been filled with misery in my other pregnancies, now I was filled with hope. I knew that you would live to be born, and that I would live to bear you."

They stumbled into their village in the early morning, close on five months after they had set out from the stronghold of the Necromancer, when the mothers were stepping out of their doors and tents with jars and pots to fetch water from the well. Though they were older and worn and scarred upon their arms and legs and faces, the village people knew them and could not mistake them, and they stared as the ones who had returned hobbled past them; and so did the few men who had risen and left their homes at this time before the full sun. The women needed to say nothing for they had nothing to say to any of them, and only their scars reproached them, the scars which healed to white lines on brown skin but which would never fade and which Rookheeya at least refused to cover up in later life, a testament to the shame of those who had sold her and her companions away. In later years men and women would often avert their eyes from the faces of those who had come back: from Werru, who bore a broken nose and broken teeth from the brunt of a stick that had lashed her across the face, and Benti who was milky-white blind in one eye and who had black scars marring her face and hands from the illness she had caught from raw tanned hides and which she had barely survived, carrying her sorrow that was darker than her scars, and Ishara whose right arm had been burned near to the bone by flames and who limped badly to the day that she died. And few could ever meet my mother's eyes, though she had no great wounds on her skin.

She walked on, on to her sister's house, and she came face to face with my aunt as Bilhah was stepping out for water herself. The breaking of the jar she let fall to the ground and her own scream brought her husband running, to find his wife embracing my mother and weeping, and Rookheeya crying at last, for the first time since she left the stronghold.

My aunt took Rookheeya into her house without a murmur, calling down blessings upon all the gods and goddesses for bringing her little sister back to her, and Rodren kindly had a house built for her so that she should not feel she was living on her family's charity, a house that she shared with her companions whom she now saw as her sisters as well. And that was where I was born some months later, on a mild night with the stars shining overhead and my aunt Bilhah, Werru, Benti, Ishara and the midwife Kala in attendance on my mother.

For her first time my mother was not in much pain, and it took only a few hours of sweating and straining to bring me into the world, all of her sisters making a throne to support her and keep her from falling when she stood on the bricks. Her hips were wide enough so that her flesh did not even tear when I came out, despite my size. I was a big baby; the midwife said I was one of the biggest she'd ever seen, grinning wildly as she held me up in triumph and as I began to wail for Rookheeya's breast. After I was fed my mother slept to recover from her exhaustion, and the women painted my hands with henna as if I were a bride, and whispered charms and spells to defend me against spirits that might come in the night to steal me away. They cooed over me, the three who had gone and returned in particular, seeing me as the child that they would never have. They kissed me and blessed me until I began to cry again, and my mother awoke to take me into her arms and rock us both to sleep.

After the customary two months of waiting until she was considered clean again Rookheeya listened to all the suggestions made by her sisters, both blood and bond, for my name. And then she named me Adahni for the Queen of Heaven who smiles down upon the world and makes the stars shine bright for travellers and those who foretell the future, the Queen whose consort is Salim, the Lord of Storms and Winds; the Queen who had shone upon my birth and cast a lucky future for me.

My story, then, had begun. But the stories of my mother and her sisters were not done yet.

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	2. My mothers

**Disclaimer: I do not own anything in the Lord of the Rings. Nor in 'The Red Tent', which helped to inpsire much of the first part of this story.**

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It is so hard to tell stories of people who, it would seem, never did anything very special. My mother and her sisters never left the village again, staying for the rest of their lives among the hills and having no more adventures or journeys, and who could be interested in a little tribe on the Western shore of the Sea of Rhûn? Yet for many years that was all my world, a small world, a world of cooking and weaving and spinning, of the hot Sun and the cool caves, of brightly coloured tents and wooden market stalls, of goats and sheep, of the great temple with the statues of the gods and goddesses, of cheese and bread and lentils and onions, of the embraces of my mother and my aunts and the love they had for me. Children grow up quickly in that hot land, but I grew and yet still remained a child. Instead of one mother I had what seemed like four or five mothers, filling our house that was built into a cave wall with talk and scolding and laughter, with smells of cooking food and the heavy scent of wool ready to be spun, with songs and stories and lullabies. I kept part of my innocence even when I became a woman, because I had grown knowing that whatever I did, my mother and her sister and her bond-sisters would be there, behind me, ready to help me up when I fell. 

If you wish to tell the story of a woman, you must first know what she held dearest. That is no trouble for me, for I knew that first in all their hearts came I, and their sisters. Even Bilhah, who was the mother of four children by the time I was born and would have many more over the years that followed, doted on me. The next that came were their gods, as it should be for all true worshippers. You could tell a great deal about my mother and aunts by the gods they chose as their own. Rookheeya loved above all the Queen of Heaven in every shape and name, as did all women, but she also held in her heart a special place for the Queen's consort, Salim, Master of the high heavens and the blue sky. The Men of Rhûn, whatever the peoples of the West might say of them, have a deep love for their homeland and for the sky above it. We call ourselves 'children of the blue sky', and blue is the luckiest colour in Rhûn, though it is rarely worn. And of course, my mother had a special affection for that colour, for it was a man in blue who had given me life, and it was a patch of blue sky that had led her from the darkness into the Sun once more.

When they had learned Ishara's name, one of our people would rightly think that her favourite goddess was Ishtara, the Fruitful One, the Lady of the Earth for whom she had been named, as I had been named for Adah. Such thoughts would be wrong. Ishara saw no reason to worship the goddess who had given her name to her but who had neglected to give her fertility as well. Bilhah, with her many children, was Ishtara's loyal worshipper; instead Ishara paid service to Laban, the Keeper of the courts of the dead, who decided on the fate of each soul that came to him once they had passed from life. It pleased my oldest bond-aunt to think that there was some justice in the world beyond this. Werru saw herself as a servant of Laban's wife, Uttu the Weaver, who captures the world and time in the cloth that she makes, for Werru was a weaver herself and believed in the fabric of life; and Benti lit incense in honour of Laban's sister, the kin to the god of Death, Renna the Sorrowful.

Each of my aunts, my mothers, was different from each other. Each of them treasured some different part of me; each of them taught me a different way to see the world, my world, our world. My mothers; although they are gone, they are still with me. I carry them in my words and in my thoughts, in my face and in my hands, in the very braids upon my head. There are still times when I think of them and find it hard to believe that they are no longer alive; my aunt Bilhah and my bond-aunts Werru, Benti and Ishara, and my mother Rookheeya.

* * *

Bilhah had been small and slight when she was a child, though you would never think it to look at her after she was married. She seemed always to be pregnant or nursing, and when she visited our house we could mark the swell of her belly or the growth of the baby that she carried on her hip at that time, the latest in the brood of my many cousins. She was plumper than my mother by the time that I was old enough to notice, with big breasts and thick ankles, and half a head shorter, but still the two sisters looked very much alike despite the different paths that they had walked, with their almond shaped eyes and strong jaws and the gesturing of the hands that they shared. Bilhah told me that in my baby years I could not tell the difference between them, and so she would watch over me while my mother slept and I would never raise a whimper. 

My blood-aunt was one of those women who could change from foolish to cunning and from playful to calm with great swiftness. Talking to her she might have seemed to have no thought beyond her home and her children, but there was far more to her than motherhood. It was she who taught me my numbers, having learned them from her merchant husband, and in some ways she was very much a shrewd merchant's wife. It was because of this shrewdness that she was able to bring me treats that I would not have had but for her; dried figs and honey dates, and even sometimes fruits that were not in season. I tasted pomegranate and cucumber because of Bilhah, and when I ran to her when she visited us, as a little girl, it was as much to see what she had brought me as to greet her. My mother often complained that she spoiled me but Ishara and Werru saw no harm in Bilhah's gifts, though often they would take part of the sweets into their own keeping so that I could be made to behave by the promise of them when my blood-aunt was not present.

Bilhah smelled of yeast, like my mother did when she was brewing and baking, but she smelled of other things as well – of milk, both her own and that of the goats her husband owned, and of the musky spices that she handled each day, and of barley water. When she hugged me all this would meet my nose in a rush of scent, and I would sigh and cuddle closer to her. She was what none of my bond-aunts nor my mother was – fat and soft, her flesh more like a cushion, and I liked to fall asleep upon her lap when her belly was small enough for me to do so, and when there wasn't a jealous cousin bawling to take my place. At other times I would press my ear to her stomach to feel my newest relative pushing against her flesh and against her skin. She was different from all of my aunts, from my mother, because she carried life inside her, and I loved her for it.

She was different, for she was brave in a way that my mother and her other sisters would never truly know. Each time she conceived and put on her red robes once more - a colour that only the soldiers of Rhûn and expectant mothers are permitted to wear – she knew all too well that once more she would risk choking out her last gasps upon the birthing bricks, her life wrung out of her to bring this newest child, living or dead, into this world. Like a man who goes into battle there was every chance that she would die in agony, or perish in the days after the birth, and yet I never saw her wearied or sad in all her years of bearing. Men truly cannot know this kind of bravery, nor women who have never had children – you cannot find it until you are the one on the bricks, the midwife before you and your sisters who become your throne around you, your body ripping your child out of you. But Bilhah found it, and because of that she walked as a seasoned warrior does – as one who had seen the prospect of her own death, more than once, and who was aware that she might see it again in time to come.

I would never know her quite as well as those I lived with. She had her own life, a life outside our little house, a life with a husband who gave her children that might kill her with every pregnancy, and that husband and those children had a right to her love as we did. Each time we bade her farewell and she retreated to a home that was not ours, I felt a pang at her leaving, but the pain was not as great as when my mother or my bond-aunts went away for a time. I knew that she would always come back in a few days. I did not yet know a time when I would not see her again.

* * *

Save for my mother, I never knew anyone of any of the Free Peoples of the world quite as wilful as Ishara, or as stubborn. Werru was soft spoken and meek and Benti said little or nothing, but her rejection by her husband and the shadow that broke others had forged the will of my oldest bond-aunt into something unbreakable. I do not think that anyone ever managed to get the better of her in an argument, not even Rookheeya, for Ishara had a mind that was quick even before she had learned to live on her wits alone, and a tongue that could be sharp as a knife one minute and as sweet as honey the next. She was the one who would go to the market to buy, trade or bargain for food or other things, a large bag slung over her right shoulder and a sturdy walking stick in her left hand so that she should not stumble and fall under the weight of what she brought back. When I grew older and taller I often went with her so I could take part of her load off her withered shoulder and arm, and so that she could lean on me as she walked, and she would say that I was better than any stave or crutch. 

As well as sharing stubbornness with my mother, Ishara also shared her distaste for men, as I have said before, but even more so. Rookheeya loved Rodren and was fond of her nephews, but Ishara held little or no regard for men in general. Unlike my mother she claimed to have respect and love for only one man and that was her own father, who had died when she was a girl, and what she had seen of males in the time since then gave her no confidence. At times she would say loudly, making Werru laugh nervously and Rookheeya chuckle and even Benti stretch her lips in a thin smile, that women needed men to make babies and to lift heavy objects, and for little or nothing else.

She held her greatest hatred for her former husband who had shamed and disgraced her before the whole tribe, saying she was worthless as a wife and worthless as a woman, and he had been the one who had given her to the troops himself. Whenever they passed in the village, as they did sometimes, she with her bag and he with his new wife or one of his two concubines following obediently in his wake, she would meet his eyes coolly and refrain from bowing her head, as a woman should do to an important man of the tribe. Then she would whisper a curse on a certain part of his body, under her breath, barely moving her lips. And perhaps her curses worked, for his wife only ever bore him one child, a daughter, and his concubines failed to conceive, and people muttered that he was sterile.

For all that Ishara hated men, she was built rather like one herself. She had big hands and feet and wide shoulders, and her narrow waist and the large hips that her husband had foolishly believed would bear an army of sons were hidden by the loose robes she chose to wear. Her voice was deeper than that of an ordinary woman as well, and her breasts were as flat and puny as a child's, and her nose and mouth seemed too large for her thin face. Quite a few in the village called her the man-woman, with a woman's body but a man's mind and voice and temper. Some even muttered – no doubt encouraged by that dog of a man who had married her for a few short months – that she was a hermaphrodite, a freak of nature, with a member between her legs as well as breasts, however small they were. My strong bond-aunt would simply laugh at their talk, for she knew that none of them dared to prove what they whispered, not least because they feared what she might do to them in revenge. She was as strong in body as she was in will, was Ishara, and before she had been burned she had proved it on the long march by carrying anyone of the women who was too weak or ill to walk on their own. Even when I was growing up, with her limp and her withered arm, she could still lift a grindstone with hardly any aid, and once when she had been arguing with a stall holder and he had taken a swing at her with his stick, she wrenched it from his grasp with her good hand and beat him with it until the hard wood broke upon his shoulders and until he was begging for mercy.

Ishara was cold to many people around her, even the women of the tribe, but she made up for her coldness to others by showering us all with her love. She saw my mother and her bond-sisters as the true sisters that she had never had, and but that it would have raised Rookheeya's ire she would have called me her own daughter, as a replacement for the one she could never have. I think that it was Ishara who nurtured in me certain wildness, a disdain to bow my head or to lower my voice in the presence of men. Ishara had no patience for many of the traditions of the tribe, nor for the duty and obedience that men expected of women; another reason why she despised them. "Men are obedient and dutiful to each other because one is more important than the other, or richer, or some such thing. We women must be obedient, simply because we are women. What does that obedience do for us?" I can still remember her deep throaty laugh as she threw her head back and basked in the Sun upon her face. "Not a great deal, Adahni, my dear, I can tell you. Not a great deal."

Ishara was not the only one of the four who defied the elders by refusing to wear a veil across her face. Benti and Werru, though they had far more to hide than other women, had gone through too much to be ashamed of themselves, even if they hardly ever left the cool of the house, and Rookheeya saw no need for it. I never took to wearing one myself, even after I was old enough to do so. But Ishara also hated to cover her fine dark hair, which she considered to be one of her best features, and instead of simply ignoring the stares of the people she would often seek out their gazes and delighted when, woman or child or even man, they dropped their eyes from her own. It seemed to her that it was a fine thing to be a woman beyond the reach of men.

* * *

As eager as I was to go to my mother or Werru or Bilhah when I was sad or happy, Benti I shied away from when I was still stumbling in trying to walk, and that was not so much because of her face and her white eye as because of her silence. The rumour in the village was that her tongue had been cut out as a delicacy for the shadowed ones to eat; those of them who had known her as a girl seemed to have forgotten that she had never spoken to anyone greatly save for Inna, and now that her sister was dead Benti's desire to speak had gone with her. My mother and Bilhah and my two other bond-aunts were content for her not to talk, knowing as they did what she had suffered, but with the cruelty of a child that had just finished being a baby I was less understanding. When I had found a pretty stone or when I had hurt myself in falling I would run to Rookheeya or Bilhah, Ishara or Werru, but not to dark sad Benti, sitting in her corner and spinning all the while, spinning string as fine as spider's web. If she was pained at the way I shunned her she never said anything of it, even when I was older, but she often watched me so closely that I would go outside just to escape her gaze. 

It was not until I was about seven that I actually heard her voice for the first time, creaking like the boards of a stall, asking me to go to the temple with her. I was astonished that the silent woman in the corner could actually speak, and then I was terrified, but glares from Rookheeya and Ishara and even a frown from sweet Werru meant that I did not dare to refuse, so I took Benti's hand with reluctance and we set out. I did not like the feel of her hand against mine, it felt far too dry, and it was all I could do not to pull my own away from hers. I thought that the ugly black marks on her skin would pass to mine, and I feared it as well.

We walked to the temple side by side and we spent much of the morning there, and though I do not remember that time I do remember that we returned hand in hand again, and I no longer wished to pull away from my quiet bond-aunt. When she went to the temple after that, once every seven days, I would always go with her.

When you grew to know Benti, if she permitted it, you would learn that her silence was as precious as an oasis, and her words came to the ears like a cool drink, despite their lack of use. If she let you see, you would see her wisdom, and her understanding. She watched and listened to her family as she spun string for Werru to weave, and she would hear our thoughts and our wishes. She listened to what we had to say, and her cool dry hands would rise to grasp and hold ours, or would rest upon my head when I buried my face in her lap and wept when I was sad and did not wish to speak, and stroke my hair. We made a gift of all that we dreamed to place before her, as if making an offering to one of the goddesses that she so loved.

If Benti spoke at all, she spoke of the divine ones, those that the Men in the West of Rhûn still worshipped, serving the One of the South more out of fear than willingness. When certain days in the year came she would sing the praises of the lord or lady of that day, her voice high and keening, and when any of us was sick with fever or illness she would sit by the side of their sleeping mat, muttering prayers to the goddess of healing. When she blessed me or any of us it was with the grace of the divine ones. In another life Benti might have been a priestess, dressed in mists of silk and her lovely face completely veiled, a mysterious servant of the temple. I never saw her in anything but the heavy garments that she and Werru made between them, and her loveliness had been taken away by her scars, but she moved with more dignity than the silly virgins in the temple ever did, and with more grace, bought with a terrible price.

A trip to the temple with Benti always went like this: first we would make our obeisance to the Queen of Heaven and the Lord of the Skies, the statue of the Lord handsome and stern, the Queen beautiful and smiling with her arms held out to you as if in welcome. Then Benti would buy some incense with the coins that Rookheeya always handed to her wordlessly at the door of our house – even when times were hard and there was less bread, though thankfully there was never a time when we had no bread, there were always coins enough for Benti's incense - and we would make our way to the alcove where the statue of Renna the Sorrowful stood, tucked away in a shadowed corner of the temple, as it should be. Benti would prostrate herself on the floor, made of some strange black stone, before the goddess, and stayed in that position for many heartbeats – I, sitting on my heels as I did, once counted near to a thousand before she sat up. We would begin to pray once she did so. Benti always prayed without a word, not even muttering under her breath as my mother and my aunt and my bond-aunts often did, as silent in this as she was in nearly everything else that she did. When I was a little girl I would speak my prayers loudly, as all children did who had not yet learned to keep their thoughts to themselves, but young as I was I had no reason yet to pray to Renna for anything. I was loved and treasured; I did not yet know grief or its meaning.

While Benti was silent with a bowed head I would look at Renna, as if the sculptor had caught her in the very act of lifting her mourning veil to wipe away her tears with her free hand. That hand stopped just short of her face, I remember, leaving the tears intact; three small diamonds – they had to be small, ours was not a very wealthy village – forever about to drip further down the dark stone of her cheek. I always dared to think that she was beautiful even in her sadness, for few look lovely when they cry, save a goddess.

When Benti was finished praying – I knew the litany though I never heard it: for her mother, for the friends she had seen die in Dol Guldur, and most of all for her dead sister – she would strike a spark to light the sticks of incense, and place them in the holders set around her that she took from the altar. I hated the smoke, for it caught in my throat and made me cough and the smell of it made me feel sick, and so I would always move backwards and to the side of her to be quite free from it. Benti did not mind. There were times in that little alcove when she hardly seemed to recall that I was there, not out of spite but because she was so caught up in her own memories. The smoke would rise up around her, cloaking her in mist, hiding the scars on her hands, seeming to ripple around her like the rise of water itself, drifting across her face and her clear eyes, both seeing and blind, without tears as she gazed up at the weeping face of the goddess. When I think of Benti that is always how I shall remember her best, a figure in the midst of smoke, distant, ethereal, half way to the next world.

* * *

Werru liked to tell me that when she was my age she had the most beautiful teeth ever seen – "Like tiny pearls, they were, each one perfect!" And then she would open her mouth to show the ruin within and grimace wickedly at me, and I would giggle, and so I never saw what was left of her teeth with any sort of disgust. Her nose had healed more or less by that time, though it would always be crooked, but there was nothing to be done for the state of her mouth save for chewing herbs to take away the pain. Werru learned to smile with her lips and not her teeth, since even the most good humoured grin on her face looked a little like the snarl of a predator. Those who could smile in return without staring were rewarded with her laughter and her gentle voice and her kindness. 

My youngest auntie was only fourteen years older than I, and she had ceased to grow in height when she was eleven, and so I was quickly able to outgrow her. My mother and my other aunts towered over her and so did I when I was old enough; from behind it was hard to tell who the child was, she or I, save that she covered her head for the first years of my life and I did not. Rookheeya and Ishara could easily have picked her up when they embraced her but they never did so, and it was only later that I learned that Werru did not like to be handled by anyone larger or taller than her. Such contact brought back memories of the days when her first blood had come, and when she had become the prey of the soldiers – men who take children into their beds are damned in my country, but any woman, no matter how young, is seen as fair game…to the men, if not to the women. Werru, like Benti, rarely went out, but this was because she was timid of what she might see and of who might see her, and might pick her up and hold her down and take what he wanted. Rookheeya and Ishara spoke of their time among the men without flinching, but Werru never did.

But Werru was not sad as Benti was sad. Her voice was often raised in song as she worked at the loom that the sisters bought with the money they had earned, and she smiled enough for all of us. Her sweet nature had been bruised by her rapes of the past, but it bloomed anew like a damaged flower when the rain comes. When I sat at her feet as she wove the cloth that we would make into our clothes she would show me how the world came into her weaving, how the warp and the threads were the land and the people, and her fingers were in place of the fingers of the great goddess. "Think of the world as cloth," she would say, passing the shuttle through the threads, "and then think of it, stitched into a glorious robe, made to sit on the shoulders of the Queen of Heaven, made to her design. Think of our history as colours in the weave, and ourselves as stitch marks, so small as hardly to be seen. We live and breathe and die as the gods will, made in the image that they ordain." Ishara would often scoff at this belief, though never in Werru's hearing, for she had a great respect for her younger bond-sister and the strength that sustained her. It was what kept her from cowering in a corner and whimpering, it was what kept her naming the goats and sheep that we bought and sheared, teaching me to do the same. It was acceptance.

Werru smelled constantly of the spun wool that she handled, and wisps of it clung to her and made strands of her hair crackle like sparks and stand out from her head. At times when I touched her those sparks would pass to me and make both of us squeak in surprise and then laugh, giggling like the children that we were. She would sit me upon her small lap and let me pass the shuttle through the threads myself, guiding my small hands with her larger ones, telling me of the great weaver and of how she brought the gift both of weaving and of history to mankind, so that we might be warmed both by cloth and by the remembrance of deeds past and long ago. Benti would often join us, spinning string as fast as Werru needed it, and when Werru was not teaching me to weave or Benti instructing me how to spin they worked fast together, never looking up from their hands, hardly pausing in their labours. There were times when my mother would whisper loudly that they made it a race to see who could out do the other, and that it was better than watching a hunt. Their hands would move so quickly it hardly seemed true, like the legs of the lizards that scuttled through the rocks, running from those that would hunt them. The loom would clatter through the air and the wool would rasp and the women would breathe, and there would be no other sound but peace.

In long, hot afternoons when my hands are empty I think of Werru, sitting at the loom that was hers, running her hands across the warp with all the tenderness of stroking a lover's face, busy and content. She was happy to sit where she was, hardly seeing the outside world, worshipping Uttu in her own home with each cloth that she finished, her dark eyes shining above her crooked nose, her jaw constantly moving as she chewed the plants that brought relief to her pain. Whenever I smell wool or see the work that she so enjoyed, I am able to dream that I am back sitting on her lap, and hearing once more about Uttu the Weaver.

* * *

And Rookheeya. What can I say that could tell what I thought of her? She was my mother. The centre of every girl's life should be her mother, and Rookheeya was the centre of mine. To the village and the people she was an attractive eccentric who bore the lashes of a slave upon her arms and carried herself with the air of a harlot queen; to me she was a goddess, divine, beautiful, all knowing, all adoring. There was no love that could have been greater than my love for her, or her love for me. 

Rookheeya reeked of the bread and the beer that she made, and our goats and sheep that she tended and sheared and cooked, smelling of comfort and assurance and safety. Her hands smelled like the scented oils that she used to help plait my hair, not even permitting her bond-sisters to do the job that by rights belonged to a girl's mother. Werru might teach me to weave, Benti might teach me to spin and Ishara teach me to see without a cloud of tradition and obedience, but my mother was the only one who would teach me to braid and coil my hair upon my head. My very first memories are of gentle fingers pulling at my freshly washed curls, coaxing them with a cold pick into the braids that would run from my forehead and temples to the nape of my neck until my moon blood came, and then the braids would be made so tight that parts of my scalp might be seen between them, if I took my headscarf off outdoors. I must have whimpered, but she was so careful that she never once pained me.

Like her sister did with her own children, Rookheeya would carry me about on her hip from place to place, hardly letting my feet touch the ground, and so I was unsteady on my feet long after many children had found their legs. She made up for this error by making sure that I would learn to speak properly. She and all my bond-aunts and even Bilhah spoke to me not as a baby but as they might to someone of their own age, and before I was more than a year old I could reply, with hardly a stumble. I learned to walk at last upon her hands, and I learned that I could cry upon her shoulders.

As I aged hers were the arms I always sought out. I loved my mother's embrace, when she would bundle me up into her arms and my feet would leave the ground and she would swing me about, her skirts and mine rippling as we moved, as if we danced. She was so light on her feet, and she taught me to be light on mine. At the time of the new Moon we would dance in the night around our home, clapping our hands, singing to encourage the Moon to return to the earth. My mother would let her hair out and it would flow in a lion's mane about her head, and her tawny eyes would flash, and her teeth would show, sharp and white. The light of the Moon would gleam upon the skin of her bare arms and upon her scars. She loved to dance so.

My mother would bake me breads of honey and fruit and onion, trying to feed me as much as she wished to, glaring at Bilhah whenever her sister brought the sweets that she could not get for me. She wanted only the best that could be had for her daughter, her only child. She dressed me in cloth made from the softest wool and braided bright ribbons into my hair. She taught me to scratch out words and to read words as well, for her father had been a scribe and she had won pieces of knowledge off him, like pieces of bread given to a beggar. She scolded me when I disobeyed her or any of those who lived in our home, and when I saw what I had done wrong she would hold me close and praise me for seeing. With a fierce desire for me to see beyond the borders of our people she told me all that she knew of the lands beyond the village, to the West and to the South. She told me of her time in the place called Dol Guldur, holding my hands and making me, young as I was, swear to remember. And I remembered. I always remembered.

I loved my aunt Bilhah and my bond-aunt Ishara and my bond-aunt Benti and my bond-aunt Werru above all the gods, but even above them I loved my mother Rookheeya. She was my mother, she was my father, and she was me.

* * *

**Sorry for taking so long. Settling in to university can be a bit of a trial.**


	3. A childhood of bliss

**Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.**

* * *

Even when I was young I knew that others believed something was missing in my family, something that made us different and wrong. Because there was no man in our household the people would talk, and their talk hurt my mother and my aunts. They would not have cared if they had been called whores, every one of them, for it was no more than the truth. But the truth was painful when Rookheeya heard the word '_murat_' follow her daughter, for _murat_ means mongrel in our tongue, and in the eyes of the tribe that was what I was; a child born out of wedlock or contract, a bastard child, and a child whose father was not known. I was a mongrel and the boys of the village made sure that I knew it. "Who is your father?" they would yell after me as I passed them by, hooting when I appeared to pay them no heed. "You have no father."

And that was the truth as well. Whoever my father had been I would never see him; alive or dead he lay to the South where I would never go. I would never know his name or his nature or why he had come to the dark forest to serve the One, or if or how he had died, and I would never know if he had been kind or cruel. I would never know if he might have loved and married my mother or abandoned us both, and in more truth I did not care. My mother and my aunts were father enough for me, and perhaps more than other girls of the tribe had. All I know for certain of the one who sired me is that he could have been a Southron, for my skin was the colour of sand, lighter even than the wild honey of my mother. There were few of the tribe who were paler than I was, and they did not live in the village at all.

The village children would sometimes climb the hills on either side of the rocky valley that they lived in and they would look over the side, holding their breath for fear of catching the disease that plagued the ones who lived in there, standing in the spot where men of the village would sometimes stand to lower down food and other supplies on a rope. There were about twenty of them down there in all, I learned, and sometimes they would not see the children looking down on them and sometimes they would, but they would never do anything. They could show no anger for their faces were wrapped up, and they had no fingers left to throw stones with. They would only shuffle about, often hiding themselves away in the shadows, curled into themselves like animals do when they die under the hot heat. Sometimes you could hear them weeping, dabbing at their eyes with their own bandages.

I remember that, for one time, and only one time, the village children invited me to come with them, and because my mother had told me to try to make friends I agreed. I was so young, but I climbed up the hills with the others and we stood and looked down into the valley, covering our noses with our sleeves so that we would not breathe in the fumes that would make our own flesh crumble and wither away. The other children whispered to each other as best they could, not quite daring to raise their voices in that dry dead place, and the eldest of the boys, Issan, told me that a few years before many of us were born these people had caught the crumbling disease and had been driven out of the tribe to this valley, away from their families and friends, never allowed to return.

I felt very sorry for them. I could not think of living without my mother and my aunts, all of my noisy cousins and even my uncle by marriage, and I hated the very thought of losing my fingers and toes and face. I asked Issan in my innocence how the village elders had known that the people had had the disease.

"Because their skin went pale, as pale as sand." He grinned at me, and the other children all giggled at what they must have known would come next, acting out their parts as if they were in a temple play. "If we pushed you down there, you would not look so different from them."

I stared at him, I remember, as my eyes began to water from more than the hot sun. I wanted to hit him, but I was afraid that he would hit me back, and he was taller than me. I was afraid that he would do as he had said, and that he would push me down into that valley and that they would all throw stones at me so that I could not climb up again and I would have to stay there forever. "You're wrong," I told him, and he sneered.

"Is that so? _My _father says that it will not be long before you are driven down there by the elders, you look so much like a crumbling one yourself, and he is right."

That I could not bear; I turned quickly so that none of them would see me crying and I ran as they all laughed out loud. I ran all the way back to our home, and I threw my arms about my mother and she threw her arms about me, and she asked in surprise what was wrong as I wept into her skirts and my bond-aunts gathered about us in amazement. When I wailed of what the children had shown me and said to me Ishara cursed Issan and his father in the same way that she cursed her husband – a curse upon their bones and scrotums – and trod about the room in anger, and Werru called him a little beast, a lying pig for having been so cruel to me; Benti said nothing, but she pressed her lips together and frowned as she bent her head over her work, and it would be only be three days after that terrible day that she spoke to me for the first time and took me to the temple and helped me to find peace. But they could not have been as angry and as sorrowful as my mother was as she rocked me in her arms and stroked my hair and let my tears soak her breast.

And then I did not cry out in sorrow but in pain, as my mother's fingers, not gentle but sharp now, pinched the skin and flesh of my arm. I pulled away from her, or tried to for she would not loose her grip on me, and she made me look at her as she spoke. "Did you feel that? Did it hurt? Good. If you truly had caught the crumbling disease, you would feel no pain if you were cut or burned. Until that day comes, you are not a crumbling one, understand? The colour of your skin does not matter, and you should not let it matter to you. You will _never_ cry in front of those fiends again, do you hear me?" She let go of my arms and clutched my face as she spoke those last words, and I only then saw that she was crying too.

It seemed unfair to me then, and harsh even now, but Rookheeya wanted more for me than just survival.

If she or Ishara ever did speak to Issan's father I do not know what they said, or if they were listened to, but from then on Issan was my deepest foe, even if he did not know it for a time. After that day I would sometimes play with the children of the village and when we were older we spoke civilly enough, for a time, but I never again sought to win their friendship. They were like owls who would face you one moment and turn their heads away the next, showing you the flat rejection of their backs.

I chose instead to play with my cousins, and indeed we became a noisy tribe unto ourselves. Alamon, the eldest and something of a fiend, was our leader only because of his age and his imagination, for he created wonderful stories for us to re-enact whenever we could escape the work our mothers set for us. We would play at being gods and demons, kings and warriors in the market place and even around the great temple, and I do believe that the village children watched us with something approaching envy. How good it is to belong to a group who accept you and who defend you against those who had made you cry! You feel as if there is nothing in the world that can harm you, for you have friends at your back that will support you and never abandon you. They will never make you cry in anger or in fear or in sorrow.

There were no tears shed in our games except when we fell in running and scraped the skin from our elbows and knees, and then there were always hands to help each and every one of us upwards and run on, pulling at our wrists and elbows not with spite but with happiness and eagerness. When the little ones were old enough to be trusted to us we would carry them with us, for Bilhah knew that we would never let harm come to any of them, and I would often play a princess or a sorceress while holding a baby on my hip, waving a stick in my other hand for a sceptre or a wand.

There were times when our little tribe would clash with the boys of the village and after taking my charge back to my aunt and running back to watch the fray, I would stand with my girl cousins and urge them onwards in my role as the first of the Blue Spirits, an old blue scarf of Bilhah's tied about my waist. That was always my favourite role in our games – the other Blue Spirit was played in turn by Dinah and Daron, twins and my two favourite cousins, only ten days older than I – and since I was one of the eldest and as Alamon had no interest in the character it was always mine. Sometimes I would even beg for Ishara's staff to wave and cast spells with when I was old enough to carry it, and she would let me have it with great good humour and I would tie ribbons about the top and imagine that I melted rocks and called down the lightening with my very gaze. Once when Issan's group of boys clashed with our group and Issan himself was holding Alamon down and rubbing his face in the dirt, I sprang to my cousin's defence and forsook magic to hit my foe very hard over the head with the staff, so hard that he fell backwards onto the ground with the tears that I had knocked out of him bursting from the corners of his eyes. That earned me both his enmity and the awe of his followers, as well as a scolding and three slaps from Rookheeya and a threat from Ishara that I should never have the staff to play with again if I behaved in such a way, even as she smiled with her eyes.

But for us there was work as well as play, and I could not avoid that labour. There were sheep and goats to be fed and tended to, and as soon as I was tall and sturdy enough to lead one of them by the nose I spent much time out among the herd with my mother, who took particular charge of our small but sturdy flock. We would sit on the green hills that looked over the sea of Rhûn, making bracelets out of stray scraps of wool and singing children's songs of the nature of the world. Then there was flour to be ground, wool to be spun, bread to be baked, food to be cooked, prayers to be said; there were times when we would go to market to sell or buy, and times when one of the sheep or goats would be killed by Rodren for us so that we would have meat for a while. We would fill lamps with animal fat so that we would see at night and make rope from the goat hair we cut from them.

Then there would be times when we went to the sea to bathe in the waters, but at other times we would heat rain or stream water for baths. Those were good nights, clouded with fragrant steam as the sisters poured hot water over their heads and rubbed each other with oils from the market and as they dried my hair into a sparking cloud about my head. We would clean the nails of our fingers and toes and scrape out our ears, scrub our faces and our backs with pieces of light stone taken from the shore to be rid of dead skin. I would sit on my mother's lap until I outgrew it and then beside her, and I would watch as Werru would run a comb through Ishara or Benti's hair, and how they would close their eyes in pleasure at such grooming. They would plait each others' hair once more and my mother would plait mine, placing kisses on my head as she did so, her lips soft and warm in each parting.

These times would come before the great festivals of the temple, when all of the tribe would put on their best robes and assemble to pay homage to one god or another, one for every month of the year, save for Renna and Laban, for death and mourning have no place at a celebration. There were delicious foods to be cooked and eaten, and in the light of the fires the women were allowed to put off their headdresses and toss their heads and let their hair shine in the light of the Sun or the Moon. There were sacred dances and songs for the honour of each god or goddess, danced by dancers clad in bright colours, and certain offerings to be made on their altar, and a ceremony involving their special animal. My mother and I would hug each other in joy as a trained eagle would be released into the sky as a tribute to Salim, and Werru would smile as a specially chosen moth would hatch from its silken shelter in front of us all and spread its wings and fly away in praise of Uttu. A captured fish would be poured back into the sea for the Lord of Waters and a deer set free for Naani, Lady of the Dance and of life eternal, and hounds and horses were raced for her lord Ouran, god of the hunt. It was wonderful to see the muscles move beneath the skin as the animals ran and to call to in encouragement to the dogs as they coiled their bodies and sprang out for another bound. I do not know a time when I did not love dogs, the friends and helpers and defenders of Men. I longed keenly to have a pup of my own, but I could only watch the powerful hounds and ache to stoke their gleaming pelts with being rebuked or snapped at.

And then there were the days when the Moon would cause blood to flow from inside my mother and my aunts. When the blood came to each of them in their turn they would rest until it ceased to flow, forbidden to do any work or to fetch or carry anything. Ishara and I would do the work of that person during that time, and my oldest bond-aunt never complained that she had no break from labour. She would only show me how to bake the special sweet cakes that a woman must eat during the time when her body prepares for life anew, the cakes that she herself would never be allowed to eat. They were made with honey and other good things, and I longed for my own moon blood to come so that I would be allowed to sit in leisure and eat such treats as much as I wished.

And also when my mother or Werru sat talking quietly to each other I was perfectly welcome to clamber into one lap or another, or to sit at their feet as they told me stories between cakes rather than between tasks. They told me tales of the very beginning of Rhûn, of how our people had woken in the lands where all life began, and that they found the land good and chose to stay and made their lives here for many long years. They told me of wars and battles and of love; of the divine ones and the tainted mortal men; of the _Malaaikah_ who wedded a divine one and bore the Morningstar on earth, and of how the Morningstar gave her love to a mortal and faded into shadow and loss when his time came to die – that was Werru's favourite story, though she would always sigh with sorrow as she told it, dabbing at her eyes.

Rookheeya would rock me upon her knees and speak of her own favourite story of a different version of the Morningstar; that it was not a woman at all, however divine she was, but a man who had lost his sons in a violent war for the Jewels of Light; and he was so distraught that he and his wife travelled all the way to the feet of the gods and goddesses and begged for them to cease the fighting, and the immortals were so touched that they agreed to lend their aid. And they set him in a ship high in the heavens with one of the Jewels upon his brow, and every night he sailed the skies before returning once more to the white tower where his wife lived as each dawn approached. I liked this story more, as it ended happily – though it was never said what happened to the sons - and I loved the thought of being able to travel among the stars and look down upon the earth below, and I would always reach for my mother's hand as she 'sailed' her fingers high above my head, capturing it and earning a kiss for my triumph.

Ishara would roll her eyes as she served them another plate of cakes, and when I begged her she would sit down and tell a tale of woe and a doomed family: of a brother and sister separated, never knowing each other, and both cursed by an evil dragon, the brother to betray his friends and the sister to forget everything she ever knew; of how they met all unknowing and wed and she conceived, and he defeated the dragon which had cursed them both but was wounded, and how his sister remembered all the days of her life and threw herself into a great river to drown, and the brother fell on his sword. But she would comfort me by saying that the woman did not die but was washed up on a distant shore and bore her children, a boy and a girl, and she raised them with no need of any man and taught them to need the aid of no one, and they both became the guardians against deception and treachery, and their mother turned into a fish and went to the sea. She would smile and shake her head, and say that the tales of the West were often more interesting than our own, if less true.

But my own favourite tales, and there were many of them, were of the Blue Spirits, the two figures who were as much a part of our folklore as the immortals themselves. In the tales they could be young or old, one man and one woman or both men, and they had no fixed names, but always they were close friends, and always they came from the West, and always they did good and wise things in the fables, and always, always they were clad in blue. They carried carved wooden staves in their hands and worked wondrous feats, stopping warfare and teaching peace and showing their wits through a thousand and more wonderful tricks. Stories had been told of them for more lives of Men than could be counted, and I adored every one of them. As I grew older I made up my own stories and chanted them to myself as I tended the flock and churned milk to cheese and ground wheat for bread, delighting in my own tales and the plots that I made up. In my day dreams I truly was one of the Blue Spirits, travelling throughout the land with my closest friend and companion, living all our days in adventure. I even fancied that my own staff would be made of some dark, exotic wood, and that my blue robes would be the colour of the sky above, trimmed with the darkness between the stars of the Queen of Heaven when night fell. And I imagined my companion as possessed of everything good and true in my life, full of love and strength and kindness and wisdom, neither man nor woman but a mix of both, my mother and my father and myself all in one.

I gave my secret friend a secret name, a name that came to me one night as I lay awake, a name of my own imagining: _Pallando_ The only trouble with this dream was that I could never think of a face to go with this great friend. I walked beside a featureless character through the plains of my mind, shaped by the words of my mother and by my own imagination. It was a pleasant dream, to journey into the lands that my mother spoke of, and wake to find myself once more at her side, safe from all harm and danger, content in the knowledge that I would never truly leave her. How could I really wish to leave? I did not think that I would ever be willing to go away forever from our village and hills by the sea, or the loving warmth of my family. How could I know that my dreams would not fade but would grow as I grew, until they could not be contained and spilled into the waking world?**

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Note: _Malaaikah_ ****means 'angel' in the religion of Islam. ****The 'crumbling disease' is, of course, leprosy.

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Reviews for the half-irish seamstress!**


	4. Outside the temple

**Disclaimer: I own no part of LOTR.**

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Many years before my mother was sent to the West and returned and bore me, our village had been very prosperous indeed. It still was even when I was growing up, for it was an important trading port and market, and it had the most beautiful temple that could have been dreamed of in all the land about the Sea of Rhún. It had been carved into the largest of the hills, the entrance facing the West and small windows carved into the other side of the hill, so that the temple would see the Sun rise in the East and set at the end of the day, and its light would shine upon the mirror the priests set and reset to catch it and the mirror would grow warm with the blessing of the one who helped us to grow our crops and grass to feed our animals.

And the statues! Every one made out of a different kind of wonderful stone - polished smooth many long years before by loving hands - some of dark and some of light, some inlaid with precious wood and a few with silver and two with gold, the Queen of Heaven and the Lord of the Storms, and all adorned with some jewels in various places, small as they were; three diamonds on Renna's cheek and about fifteen or twenty spangled in the Queen's unbound and curling hair, five large emeralds for the green shoots that sprouted from Ishtara's very fingers on her outstretched hand and ten smaller ones for her sister Ishti's feet, many pearls to line the robes of the Water-king Hee-Un, some rubies for Aulor's strongly carved arms and Tarak's armour and some strange, dark stones for the Keeper of the Dead and the Great Weaver, stones which held stars within them, star stones; a moonstone for each of the hands of the Mistress of Healing and the Master of Dreams, Ediri and Loren; five lion's eyes for Ouran and a belt of turquoise and beads in her stone hair for Naani, and sapphires to sit on the neck and brow of Salim.

A less true believer would have forgotten their prayers and would have stared all day at such wealth, but we knew better. Do not think that we prized the statues of the gods more greatly than those they showed! We looked upon the faces of the ancient idols and saw not stone but through to the true one who had inspired the statue's creation. When we laid flowers before them or poured out wine or oil, we did it not in adoration of the image, but for the one who was brought to us through stone and wood. We did it not out of duty, but from love.

There was always the smell of stinging incense and of flowers that overpowered the scent of the braziers. There were as many smells here as there were in the market place, sweeter and crisper, soothing your nose or making you start. There was special oil the priests used to anoint the brows of the gods, and perfumed oil the priestesses used for the goddesses. There was the smell of sacred wine and sweet wine, oh, so many sweet things! My mouth would water when we went to the market, but in the temple my eyes would be damp from the beauty and goodness of it all.

And then there were the smaller figurines which held my love as well. On either side of the entrance was a smaller statue of one of the Blue Spirits, and whenever I went in I would run to one and then the other to greet them, and in the summer I would bring them each a flower, as others brought them little cakes or money in hope of receiving good luck and happiness. They were both clean shaven and looked rather like a cross between man and woman, like Ishara, and they smiled with great good humour. Near the statue on the left was the form of another spirit, the Grey Wanderer who lived in the mists of the mountains in the West. This spirit was stern but kind and very wise, and he guarded faltering people against the illusions that the world offers to deceive Men. The people saw him as the greatest foe of the White Demon, a creature whose spotless robes were never stained even as darkness clung to his inner being, whose image was not present in the temple. The two would battle with wits and words, one seeking to deceive and destroy while the other sought to mend and enlighten.

There were the two mirrors, one for the Sun and one for the Moon, set on stands of wood and covered in gold or silver, the Sun mirror cared for by the priests and the Moon mirror by the priestesses. I never went near the Sun mirror, for fear the priests would warn me off with blows, but on the few nights when my mother took me to the temple she would lift me up to look into the Moon mirror and I would stare into the surface, my head made out of shadow and my face cast in darkness for once, surrounded by the Hunter's light. It was always cold to the touch, and touching it was like placing my fingers upon smooth, polished ice as I whispered the secret name of the Pale Hunter.

There were little alcoves to buy incense from, which the younger acolytes of the temple replaced every day, and braziers which my mother would not let me go near until I was older. The floor was always cool, but never cold, the lights were always comforting and warm. It was safe from the rain and the heat, from storms and winds and dust-tempests. It seemed that the temple was safe from anything.

The business of the town was decided by the elders, but it was in the temple that our own lives were ordered. In our household we lived as the gods wished us to live, and we did not let the elders nor even the high priest tell us what to do. Other women wore veils, but we did not; other women did not speak to men outside of their families, but we did. And I did not know why this was, nor did I ever think to ask why. Things were good for us in the village, as good as they would ever be. No one challenged the right of my mothers to do as they wished, and no one told them what to do. They whispered things, but they never followed through on them. And because none in the tribe dared touch them, none in the tribe dared touch me.

The first man to put his hands on me in anger was not one of the tribe.

They came in the late summer, the soldiers from the east of Rhûn, darker skinned than those of our village and proud of it. They served no gods or goddesses, they pledged their word only to the One of the South, and they brought the hot heat into our village and set the flames to make anger and shame cook and bubble. It was a few days before the festival of the harvest and the children of the village were sent to gather flowers to decorate the temple, and I went with my cousins to bring colour from the hills. The first I saw of those men was a flash of deep red in the crowd at the foot of the temple steps, blocking our way to the cool of the sanctum. Dinah and Daron were reluctant, but with my arms full of wildflowers I threaded my way through the gaps between the men and the fewer women, until by some chance I came to the edge of the circle that had been made around the men and the servants who held their fine-blooded horses as they stood and glared at the high priest. I knew at once that they were warriors, not only from their clothes and the long curved swords at theirs sides and the dressing of their mounts but from their proud and haughty faces and their cold manner, the manner my uncle had when he killed goats for us, detached and harsh. Their skin was as dark as the very darkest of clay and their eyes were hard like black stones, and their voices were thick with a dialect that twisted their words. They argued with the high priest, and they grew more and more coldly angry as he argued back.

"You cannot or you will not do as we say?" was the first question of the tallest of them that I heard as I broke through to the front of the people. His face was handsome with the beauty of a finely crafted sword, all fine cheek bones and sharp planes of the face and narrow eyes; even his beard was combed and cut to a point. His skin gleamed like oil on water, and as I looked at him I could believe that if he touched me, I could wash and wash and wash and never be clean again. And his eyes were filled with storms, not those of the Lord of the Sky but of the dark line that was always on the horizon, the promise of darkness to come.

"We wish only for peace," were the words that came back to him, from the eldest and wisest of the priests. "We have no desire to quarrel with those of the East or…of the South." Those last words caused whispers to run about the circle like scattered herbs blowing in the wind. Many of the women grabbed their sons, near to manhood or only children, and held them close if they would pull them back from the brink of a great pit. All remembered the last time that the South had made demands of the tribe, for of all the youths and the girls who had gone into the West only four women, scarred and burned and withered and one with child, had ever returned. The South was a place of horror and dread command, a darkness inescapable, like the shadows beyond the light of the lamps where some children were still left out to die.

"You are here only because the One allows it!" the dark man said, pointing at the great temple as his lip curled and his finger stabbed the air. "And yet you worship foreign gods, you pay homage to those other than the One! This must not be allowed to go on!"

At this the crowd muttered louder, in anger or worry I did not know. The high priest, a stubborn but good man, did not hesitate to reply. "We send tribute to the One. Our young men were taken from us for the armies. What more is wished of us?"

"Tribute is not enough. You cannot serve more than one Master. You must choose which that will be, or you shall all be branded as traitors." The dark men smiled as those about me murmured or cried out in dismay, as the leader went on: "You must pull down the statues, the pillars, the temple itself!"

There were cries of outrage now, and one of them came from Daron, who had wormed his way to my side by this time. My cousin was a sweet faced boy, but Bilhah would whip him for his temper and his outbursts; now he yelled an insult at the leader who had spoken such words. "The White demon should befoul you with his dung, you and your men and the horses you rode in on!" I kicked him to make him be quiet, for I was scared that the soldiers would turn on him and pull out their swords and cut off his ears, his nose, his hands, his head; but the leader had heard him and was already turning his head to look in our direction. Daron hissed and darted backwards, but it was not his arm that was seized by a rank, foul touch to drag him forward again. It was mine.

I dropped the wildflowers and they were crushed under my feet as I was pulled forward into the centre of the circle, and I stumbled and crashed into the man's hot, spice-smelling body, and stared at the terrible red image upon his armour that could have been a red eye, glaring at me. At once I was pushed away and held tightly at arm's length by my wrist, and another hand at my chin forced me to look up into the face of the man and he looked down at me and he saw my skin, browned by the sun but still too light to show anything but mixed blood, and then he bared his teeth as he looked away from me to speak to the high priest again. "So, now you even harbour filthy spies from the West, a white skin in this very village? I would expect nothing less of such lowlife."

I looked too at the high priest, a man who had blessed me along with the other children in the festivals, one who had never spoken ill of my mother or my aunts, a man who I knew was good and honourable. But he looked at me as if he could not see me at all, as if I were as thin as the air itself. Beside him I saw the faces of men and the hard eyes of women. Some looked at me as if I were a goat being made ready for slaughter, and some looked as if they were sorry or afraid for that goat, but were too afraid to stop the culling. No one seemed ready to make a reply.

In all my life I had never been so frightened as then, not even when horses had broken free and stampeded through the market, and I would have been trampled if my mother had not caught me up in her arms and run as if the One of the South himself were behind her. I felt sweat start at my sides and on my forehead and my skin grew hot and all the spit dried in my mouth, and I thought that he might draw his sword and cut off my head and no one would raise a word of protest. In my heart I yelled for my mother and my aunts, but they were not there. For the first time I was alone, facing danger, perhaps even death. I wanted to scream for help to somebody, anybody that would hear me and would not let this man kill me.

Instead I remembered what Rookheeya had told me – that I should never lose my tranquillity or my temper – and so I forced some spit back into my mouth and I told him that I was not a spy or a white skin; that I was a daughter of the tribe, a child of the blue sky, and that he had no right to treat me in such a way. He looked at me with those eyes of black storm and I could see myself in them, but with the pallor of one dead.

"You claim this? You claim that you are one of our people? Then who will speak for you?" he asked, with a horrid smile on his face. I looked about the circle and I saw no one. Daron was gone, Dinah was gone, my mother and my aunts were not there, I was alone. I was alone, biting my tongue to stop myself from screaming at his touch and from my fear. The red symbol on his chest mocked me, as red as my own blood. There was pain in my head and I could taste sharpness in my mouth that burned.

But there was anger in my fear as well, anger that this man had no right to hold me or hurt me, and anger at dying. I did not want to die. I did not want to be robbed of my body and cast out to wander formless, faceless, a wisp of a ghost. I did not want to die, when there was so much for me to live for and to do.

And he no longer looked at me but over me, and desperately I turned to see if what he looked at would save me. And then my fear was gone, sighing from my mouth as I breathed once more.

My mother had come. She stood tall and proud, her arms bare and beautiful and showing her old scars as she walked through the people, her tawny eyes narrowed and her lips pressed firmly together. Never did my mother look more lovely than when she was angered, and never was she more angered than when someone spoke out against her child. And now she walked to stand in front of the man who held my wrist, her robes sweeping in the sand and the dust, and she opened her lips and spoke with words as calm as still water and as cold as ice. "Let go of my daughter."

He looked at her, and he could not have ignored the plaits on either side of her face, peeking out from under her head scarf, which showed that she was not married. He must have seen the haughty set of her mouth and the slope of her neck as she held her head high. He surely must have seen the marks upon her arms, marks of shame that she had turned into triumph. He looked at her, and he did not smile as he spoke: "You claim her as your child?"

"Look at her face, and then look at me." Rookheeya thrust out her chin, turning her head to one side and then the other so that he could see all of her wonderful face and the colour of her skin, lighter than that of the people but not as light as my own. "How could such a beautiful girl be of any blood but mine?"

"And who got her upon you?" His words were sneering. It seemed that no one around us even dared to breathe as they watched this sight before them, the sight of my mother defending me against one who came from a place where women were stoned to death for adultery and disgusting behaviour.

"That I do not know. You are free to go into the West and seek him out, but I doubt that you will find him. It does not matter who he was. She is my daughter, and that is more than enough. Let go of her."

"And why were you in the West?" the man demanded. His fingers were now so tight upon my wrist that I could not feel my hand, except in pain. I wanted to struggle and bite, perhaps even gnaw through my flesh to get away from him, as an animal chews off its own leg to get out of a trap, for I knew that the longer he kept hold of me the more it would be possible that he would never release me. I looked to my mother, and I saw then that my bond-aunts, my other mothers, Ishara and Benti and Werru, had stepped out from the crowd around the three of us, and Dinah and Daron stood behind them, both panting from having run to fetch them, as they must have. That Werru and Benti had left our house at all was marvellous, but the fiercely glaring Ishara had purposefully unlaced her right sleeve and was showing off her withered arm as if it were a trophy, and gentle, quiet Werru scowled with the remains of her teeth at the one who held me, and Benti stared at him coolly out of her one eye and the ruin of her face. And before them stood my mother Rookheeya, and she folded her arms and looked at him as if she might spit in his eye or dismiss him as if he were merely a slave.

"Sold I was and sold we were to the West, by those who had called themselves our people, to please men like you. I gave use of my body for there was nothing I could do but bring comfort to youths sent to die; the comfort that can only be found in a woman's spread legs. Beaten we all were and mistreated, and when the soldiers lost and the dark fortress in the dark forest was taken we were turned loose, I with life in my belly. And we returned to where we had lived before we died and came back to a different life in the pit. As an _isha_, a reborn, I raised my daughter here, teaching her that she is worth more than any who scorn or abuse her, and I will not suffer any to harm her or hurt her; and so you will let her go or I will make you bleed for it."

"You are a filthy whore." There was no honey to the words, no hidden meaning. He called my mother that, in front of the priests and the priestesses and the people. He spat those words at her, and yet she merely looked calmly at him, as if she would ask if that was all he could say. But that was not what she said next.

"And you are one who would lie with his own mother, for not even a whore would want you." There could not have been more venom in a snake bite than in Rookheeya's voice as her words were followed by echoes of shock, horror and even a few sounds of amusement, very quickly muffled. Now I see that it could have been the most stupid thing for her to say, with my arm held by the very man that she insulted. But my mother was very much a wise woman, and even as he gaped at her, perhaps hardly able to countenance that she had spoken to him in such a manner, she moved forward as quickly as a snake bites and seized his fingers, forcing his hand away with her own and tearing his very skin with her nails – I wonder that she could bear to have that man's blood upon her! - and pulling me to her with the other. Her arms came about me and she turned partly away from the one who had held me as I buried my face in her warm dress. I know now as I did not then that this was to protect me as well as to comfort me, for if he drew his sword and brought it down it would be her that the weapon struck first. If I felt her skin tremble, it was only for a heartbeat; only a very brave person or a fool is not afraid of death, and while my mother was brave she was not a fool.

"And if we are filthy whores, what of it?" Ishara's voice cracked through the silence that now filled the air. "What of the ones who sold us into whoredom, or the ones who made us so filthy as they drove into us again and again…and again?"

"And what of the diseases that were spread to us?" Werru spoke now, and I could see her fists so tight that the knuckles were pale. "What of the pain, and the blood, and the losses, and of the overlooking of our despair, so long as the ones who used us were satisfied? What of them?"

There was a sigh, and Benti opened her mouth, and for the first time since she had returned from the dark land she spoke in front of the people, dispelling forever what ideas they might have had about the state of her tongue. "We are more than we once were. Rage all you like, but we are beyond your reach, and if you harm any of us, or our child, then you are cursed by every divine one that there is."

I hardly knew which of us five the man wanted to kill more, his face was so filled with rage and hate, but he managed to spit that he did not believe in such weak illusions, and they would not save us.

"Is that so?" Benti's good eye shone as if she were a statue of a goddess herself. "That is your own worry, then; but look you, for if you strike us down then all the land about us will come in time to know that you have turned your blade against the _ishan – _and will this land stand at all with you then?"

And before he could say another word my mother straightened her shoulders and spoke once more, with more poison and coldness than ever; "If any _ever_ makes attempt to harm my daughter again, then I curse them. Be they man or woman or child, if they touch Adahni, daughter of Rookheeya, with ill intent then I call down upon them the fury of every god and the wrath of every goddess, the rage of every spirit and the vengeance of every demon, and I curse them in living, and I curse them in dying. Touch my daughter, o you who would see the traces of your shame swept away, or who would take delight in causing her pain for your own sick pleasure, and you will be unclean and you will be damned."

Many times had I heard curses, but never from my mother's lips, and never a curse such as this, spoken with such power and such might. I cowered at the centre of the storm that was my mother as she let thunder and lightening fall from her lips, and when at last she ceased there was salt water upon my cheeks, for I had made it rain with tears. But I wiped my face against my mother's breast, and none knew that I had wept, not even she as she led me from the circle, ignoring the dark man as he spat on the ground behind her and poured scorn and threats of retribution upon her head in his turn.

But he did not come after us, and we walked with Daron and Dinah back to our house with no more words, as my cousins clung to me as if I might still be lost and as we trailed broken flowers in our wake that mixed with sand and dust. When my mother made me lie upon my blanket my fear and the cost it had demanded of my body took away my wakefulness, and I knew no more until the evening when I woke to the sound of voices that whispered and yet could be heard.

"They will not turn against her," said the deep voice of Ishara. "We managed to make them feel ashamed and put the fear of the gods into them too. And that wretch does not have the stomach to come after us."

Werru spoke in turn, agreeing with her: "Anyone who harms her will face the wrath of the tribe as well as our own. They are all too superstitious to take such chances."

"But that is not good enough!" I heard the pad of my mother's feet and rustle of her skirts as she trod the floor, her ice coldness now melted into disarray. "She is safe for now, but what will happen when we are gone? Who will defend my daughter when our protection is faded and the curse dies with us, to be forgotten?"

"If she were a priestess…?"

Werru's timid question was questioned itself. "What if the temple refused her? The high priest himself was there, and he did nothing, _nothing_ to stop that…that… _oh!" _My mother groaned as if she were in pain."Gods and goddesses forgive me these words, but their human servants are frail and marred. I respect those in the temple, but I do not trust them to save and protect my Adahni."

"What then?" Ishara demanded. "Even if we all wished it, no one will take her as a wife. We do not have nearly enough for a dowry for any decent man, if there is such a thing, and I would rather die than let her be made into a concubine."

"Kala." At first I did not know what it was that Benti said, so quiet was her voice once more, but when Werru repeated it thoughtfully I was certain.

"Kala."

"Truly, that would work. They could not touch her then. The life of a midwife is sacred."

"Do you think that Kala would agree to teach her? She has not had an apprentice in all the years she has been here."

"We can only try." And because Rookheeya was a good and observant mother, she called over to where I lay to return to sleep, and she came to sit by my side and stroke my hair and hold my hand in hers until I forgot my fear once more and did so.

* * *

Ishara took me to the market the next morning with her arm once more covered and only her withered hand visible as it grasped her stick. I walked beside her with my bag upon my shoulder, and as she had told me to do I stared straight ahead and did not look around at the whispers that followed us. I thought of them as dry grasses blown by the wind and not as human mouths with staring eyes.

Never had we bought such food as we did that day, save for celebrations in the household. My eyes widened as Ishara chose pomegranate syrup for sauce and for dipping bread, figs and plums, pieces of dripping honey comb and a jar of the very best sweet wine that was to be had in the market, dried leaves of exotic spices and a bag of rock salt for flavouring, salted fish and the flesh of roasted birds, and fresh mint to make mint tea; and most wonderful of all there was sweet _kakaw_ paste, mixed with vanilla and honey, brown and creamy and soft and delicious, a treat I would be lucky to taste more than once or twice a year. I was laden down like a pack mule with all of these good things, and Ishara gave me some of the paste smeared on a piece of hard bread and I licked it greedily all the way home, trying to make it last.

All the later part of the day my mother and Werru slaved over the cooking stones, covering a leg of goat in the syrup and making sauce and bread and barley water, while Ishara swept the floor and Benti made certain that everything was just so in the house while I sat in the corner and crushed almonds to make paste for biscuits, for our guest had a great love of sweet things. Soon we turned to clean each other, washing our faces and scrubbing our hands, my mother mourning that we had not had time to wash my hair and Ishara saying that Kala would not care about the state that my plaits were in so long as I did not look like a scabby little child, even as she pushed bangles onto her wrists.

Kala came at my mother's invitation with the lengthening of the shadows, a hollow faced woman who dressed only in yellow trimmed with faded red and who, like my mother and my bond-aunts, did not wear a veil across her face, taller even than Ishara. How old she was I do not know, but she had lived long enough to deliver my mother and perhaps her mother before her, and other mothers of children now grown. I shrank away from her as she entered, for even if she had helped me into the world she had the power of life and death in her hands; she knew how to save a woman's skin from tearing as her baby came and how to deliver it if it came feet first, how to suck the death from the little one's nostrils with reeds if it came out blue and breathless, and if the woman died – for even as good a midwife as Kala was, some of them did die – she knew how to cut the child free from its mother's body so that it would not die with her. She looked over at me coolly, and as I quickly bowed my head I heard her chuckle and say something about my having grown much since last she saw me close.

First Rookheeya made certain that she was seated well, as we all were. We offered her barley water flavoured with syrup and the sweet wine and the almond and honey biscuits that I had made, and the women spoke of many things within the tribe and outside it, for Kala had travelled for some years before she had settled in the village, and took great interest in what lay beyond its borders. My mother and my bond-aunts were respectful to her but not subservient, and they could tell that she liked this. They spoke as equals speak when one is far older than the others. And then they spoke, however calmly, of the circle outside the temple, and Kala frowned at it. "They are near to shadowed ones, those men from further East. They will want to bring their darkness here if they could. It's swallowed them up, so that all that is left is ambition and hatred. They will bite us, like the blood-drinker, the vampire, and will make us like them, hollow like empty shells."

We ate all of the wonderful meal that Rookheeya had worked so hard to make in silence, and I thought that as soon as the food was finished I would be sent from the table while the women talked, but when the platters were cleared my mother quickly began to speak once more; not of events but of us and of me, and of what she feared might happen once she could no longer protect me. And Ishara and Werru bargained with her too, while Benti sat beside me and held my hand in her cool dry one.

Kala leaned her head on one hand and sat through their words with apparent boredom, as if she had heard such requests many, many times before, but her eyes kept looking to me. "What do _you_ think of all this?" she asked me suddenly, cutting off Ishara as she began to speak again to persuade her, lifting her eyebrows. "Do you truly wish to become a midwife? Or do you simply wish to escape those who might harm you by taking on this role?"

I was not as unprepared as I might have been, for Rookheeya had told me as she kneaded bread that I must have my own reasons for wishing to learn the ancient craft, and left me to think on it. And I had my answer, poor as it was. I looked into Kala's eyes, and I told her that I knew what it was like to be afraid to die. I did not want ever to feel that fear again, and I wanted to stop others from dying when they should be living.

"And what of your own life?" she asked, sitting upright now, looking not at my troubled mother but at I alone. "What of the husband and children you might not have, if you choose to take up this way?"

"Then I'll have no husband, nor children. But I don't want a husband, and I'll find other children in the babies I help birth."

My mother took Kala outside after that while Werru made me at least pretend to sleep now that the day was over. I lay upon my mat and could not find rest, for I longed to know what Kala would decide. I did not wish to be a midwife with a passion, but I wished to be safe and to learn to prevent death from coming for others at it had come for me. I hoped that Kala might like me, and choose me where she had chosen no other.

The last I remember is Kala's words. "When she becomes a woman, then. When her moon blood comes, then I will return and see if she is worthy." And once more I longed to be a woman, and yet still wished to be a child, and I could be the one or the other, but not both. Not both.

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Note: Kakaw is an Aztec term for the cacao bean. Yup, they've struck _**chocolate.**_

**Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress.**


	5. Farewell to childhood

**Disclaimer: I do not own LOTR. Or _The Red Tent_. **

**Watch out for the inevitable hints of puberty.**

* * *

As if to make the last years of our childhood all the more bitter-sweet for the eldest of us to bear, the days were better than we had even known them to be before. After the harvest more rains came than were expected and sooner in the year and the houses and tents were flooded and some who lived by the shore had to camp in the temple until the time came that they could return to their homes. But it was glorious to stand out of doors and feel the cool drops upon the skin, and we laughed and ran screaming with delight, splashing in deep puddles and having mud fights, coming home somewhere between filthy and drenched clean.

And when the spring came, what a difference the floods made to the crops, and to the hillsides! There had always been greenery around the streams and on the slopes, but the plants had always been poor wispy things and only the flowers brought any colour to the land. But now the ground was so covered with blossoms you could not see the earth between them, and they were hardy enough that you could lie full upon them and would do them no harm. The belief was that Ishti of the Eternal Renewal had walked in the wake of Hee-Un's gift, and so in thanks each of the tribe picked one flower – just one, instead of the usual armfuls at the end of the harvest – to place upon her altar. Even the flocks seemed to know that this bounty was not to be devoured at once but treasured, and so they nibbled only sparingly and the hills were not without colour even when the dog days of the year came. And when at last the flowers were gathered their scent did not die with them, for they gave their essence to perfume, incense and sacred oil for many years after that blessed year.

The rains had spread further East and South to groves and pastures which drank them up, and at the middle-year markets there was wheat for flour and thus more bread, and whole stalls heaped with figs and quinces, star fruit and different kinds of olives, and plums. I carried a load back for Ishara and we all spent an afternoon and an early evening pitting the tart fruits for drying until our fingers were dyed by the juice of their skins, and we feasted on the fresh ones that we had left. There were pomegranates as well, and early one morning Ishara and I spent all the day's money on honey and a bounty of oranges both bitter and sweet, crowing in triumph as we brought them back to make into preserves to smear on our bread and to devour the rare sweet ones that are rightly called sun-fruit, so large and bright and wonderful. There were few things as good in all my life as those oranges, those sun-fruits, eaten with my mother and bond-aunts and some of my cousins who had tumbled upon our bounty in their turn on a hot day. I remember peeling them for myself and for the small hands of the children and for Ishara – for her withered hand could make little work of the skins – and cramming the pieces of flesh into my mouth, letting none of the juice escape from between my lips. Essan, the youngest but one, covered his face with juice as he ate and then Talim by some chance managed to knock him over so that he landed in the dust and it stuck to his face, and he howled most awfully until we cleaned him off and washed the dust from his eyes, and then he would have eaten oranges again until he burst but that we said enough had been eaten and we should save some.

It was a year of bounty, a year of plenty, a year of sweet days and sweet games, and it was also a year of farewells to their kin for those who were set apart.

It was in that glorious spring, the year after I was promised to Kala if she would have me, when Alamon came of age at fifteen years to the day since his birth. For a son to reach adulthood is a triumph for his parents in a land where children may die so easily when young, and while Bilhah and Rodren had been far more fortunate than most there had been losses; more than two years between Alamon and my twin cousins where a second born son had died in infancy and a miscarriage had made Kala advise my blood-aunt to leave off bearing for a while, and there had been two more cradle deaths as I was growing up. To see her first son live to grow into the handsome and proud youth that he had become was both a joy and a sadness for her, a duty fulfilled and a duty ended, as Alamon became a man of the tribe and would in time take a wife and have children of his own. She knew that he would now be his father's son and that while a good man believed the stars lay beneath his mother's feet, Alamon was not the sort who would remember that too well. My eldest cousin lived in the present, a burning light that thought not of where it came from, nor much of where it would go.

Because Alamon's ceremony was the first that I witnessed, it is the one that I remember the best, and all those that came after were mere copies of that day. As close blood-kin Rookheeya and I were of course welcome at the ceremony, and we came in our newest robes and brought fine presents, a full length tunic dyed in rare and costly green and trimmed with fine embroidery to be worn at celebrations that my mother had commissioned from one of the best weavers in the tribe, and a belt of finely worked and intricately designed leather. We sat upon cushions by Bilhah's side and ate sweetmeats and pieces of cooked meat, fruits and pieces of honey comb and quince preserve, and dipped biscuits into a pot of _kakaw_. The men drank tiny cups of water of life and we all watched as Alamon was presented with his gifts from his mother and his father, his father's brothers and his mother's _isha _sister, full of pleasure and pride at each new offering as his siblings looked in envy at the growing heap around him and his father and uncles sang deep, throaty songs in his honour, and the women clapped their hands to the beat of the music. He kept turning his head this way and that, showing off – as if we had not seen them before then! – the new rings in his ears and the second ring on the left lobe set in the hole that Rodren had bored only that morning with a heated needle, the sign and right of a grown first born son and an aid to see more clearly and guide his family well.

When I think of him now, I remember how darkly handsome he looked upon that day, the fine curls of his hair peeping out from under his new head scarf wound about his head, seated like a young prince in his confidence and role as the centre of the celebration, only disdaining to speak because of the soreness of the stud that had been pushed through his lower lip. I looked closely to see if he had changed at all now that he was a man, if he had received some special gift that had changed him from boy to adult. I looked and looked, but his face was the same as when last I saw him the day before, and he seemed as conceited and proud as ever with none of the wisdom that adulthood brought. I hoped that the earrings would do their work quickly and make him prudent and foresighted, or he would never be a good leader of the family.

But as his youngest sister, mere weeks away from having her hair plaited for the first time, wrestled with her brother upon the floor and tumbled into my aunt's lap, and as she scolded them for interrupting their brother's special day and to show more respect as she straightened Ruti's smock and tweaked Essan's nose, I watched Alamon watching them, his eyebrows lowered and his high cheek bones thickening as he frowned at the children. I thought that he was angry at them for taking the attention from him, but as Ruti laughed and ran to me and sat in my lap and as I bounced her on my knee my eyes met his, and he frowned at me in turn, though I had done nothing but sit quietly.

I thought then that he did not scowl at us but at the thought of what he had lost; his role as the leader of the children, the architect of stories and games. Now another would take his place – perhaps I, or Dinah or Daron; most likely Daron, for Dinah and I would soon be women – and he would merely be an ordinary man, for all that he was a first born son. It was both funny and tragic, a fitting way to curb the arrogance of a boy who had been worshipped by those who were younger than him but would now have everything demanded of him from those who were his elders.

When the shadows began to creep into the house and the Sun was veiling her fierce glow the celebration was finished, and the guests left the house and returned to their own homes. But Bilhah and my cousins also left the house and stood watching the Sun as she set, leaving Alamon alone in the house with his father and his uncles. They would not go back in until they were called by the men.

At the time, I did not understand why this was. There were some things that my mother did not tell me, or did not know. To me, the world of men was still such a mysterious place.

* * *

With Alamon gone from our number as he began to learn in full the business of being a merchant, there were fewer games. I felt sorry for the younger ones for not being born in the time when our little tribe was at its height; they came to us during the last years when the bright leaders were being weaned from childhood. I see now just how our passing showed the end of an empire. Remove the figureheads, the idols, and you remove the power and the resolve. We three did our best, but we did not have the confidence that Alamon possessed. Our time in power was marked not by the stirring up of passion for fights both mock and real, but of stories. When our time was free we would sit and tell them the tales that our mothers had taught us, and would watch as they acted them out. We were set apart from them even if we had not departed from their ranks yet.

On other days Dinah and I would be sent out to tend the flocks together, as if our mothers recognised the need for our time alone, and we would sit on the hills and talk, breathing in the scent of the flowers all about us. We shared the secrets of what we knew of men and laughed at the way that they were slaves to their lust, how some of them could think of nothing but sharing a bed, sometimes with more than one bed mate, thinking with the tender baggage between their legs. Dinah, my knowing cousin with so many brothers, whispered of how she had been woken in the night by the moans of her parents during their lovemaking or the sighs and movements of Alamon in his sleep, and how in the morning there would be a stained blanket or two to wash. She laughed at how aghast I was, and cheerfully assured me that she had long since grown used to it. She only prayed that Daron would not in time do the same as Alamon.

I also learned that she, like me, did not want to marry; but neither did she want to have children. She had heard her mother scream every time she brought another brother or sister into the world, and had wept with her over an infant girl who had died before she was named. "I do not want that pain," she said, "or that sorrow, not ever." Bilhah and Rodren had agreed with the high priest and the high priestess that she would go to the temple as soon as she came of age, and Daron would follow her, and she would be a priestess of the Lady of the Dance and he would be a priest of the Lord of the Hunt, a sister and brother serving a sister and brother as was fitting. "I have agreed to it, and so has Daron. He likes it in the temple, and he will grow to have importance. He has lived in Alamon's shadow for too long."

And then our talk turned to what I would do when I was grown, and I swore her to secrecy before I told her of what my mother and my bond-aunts wished and hoped for me. She wondered and we agreed that it would be a splendid and wonderful thing if Kala accepted me as she had done no other, even if Dinah baited me by saying that I would always have rough work to do and stay around women screaming insults while she dressed in silks and let her hands grow soft. I baited her in turn by saying that at least I would not stay cloistered up in the temple with no one remembering what I looked like and wearing my feet out with dancing, and then we began a mock battle by pinching each other and laughing as we rolled and wrestled and the heady pollen of the flowers rose about us.

We ended that one afternoon by lying on our backs and looking up at the blue sky, and then we looked at our budding breasts and wondered who would win the great race, who would be the first to leave her childhood behind, who would be the first to become a woman. I ran my hands across my face, over the growing mounds of flesh upon my body to rest upon my flat stomach and lower down. I wanted to be first, not because I had any desire to win a race but because I wanted it to be over, I did not want to wait and wait in this half life where I was not child or woman but some strange mix of both. We two were awkward in our bodies as we changed from one thing to another, growing the curves to carry and feed the ones that we would never bear. In some way I mourned those infants that would never be mine, as if I had betrayed them by refusing to give them life, but that childish part of me that had once dreamed of their numbers and how I would raise them had faded. I was not my mother, not an _isha_, and I could not have children without a man by my side. And while my body was making me ready for one, I did not want a man.

* * *

I won that race on a summer afternoon late into the dog days, when the itch that had started between my legs in the morning turned into a dull pain in my gut and when I searched for the reason in private my fingers came away wet with something of a deep brown and smelling of metal. I could hardly believe what I saw. Was this it, a dark stain upon my thighs and an ache in my stomach? Was this what I had waited for so impatiently? Was this what changed me from child to maiden? It seemed almost a joke, a trick played by the Earth-Mother, something as commonplace as this.

But it was proof, and so I ran to Rookheeya holding out my hand so that she would see, and she did see, and my mother embraced me and held me close to her as the others crowded to see what had happened. They cried with joy as they learned the truth and hugged me in turn, but I kept being drawn back into my mother's arms with my head drawn into her shoulder. I was tall by then, and I would be as tall as her, taller. She whispered my name again and again as her hands touched my face and my head. She had nothing more to say.

It was Ishara who took charge of it all, telling Werru and Benti to bring out the things that would be needed and to be quick about it, and shaking Rookheeya's shoulder and advising her that if she wanted the ceremony to happen this night, she should prepare my hair. She took it upon herself to hobble out of our home as fast as she could, her staff ringing against the stones under the sand as she went to fetch something, or someone. Rookheeya led me to sit at her feet as she unpicked the plaits in my hair and combed it until it hung about my head in a heavy weight; she ran her fingers through it over and over, curling strands about them and tugging gently. I was content to let her do so, not knowing when she might do so again. She said it was a terrible thing that I should have to cover such beautiful hair from now on, and I joked that I could leave it uncovered like Ishara did and let it swing about my head like a warm headscarf itself.

"That would be a fine thing to see," Rookheeya agreed. But she did not say that I could do such a thing. She went on with her work as Werru stoked up the fire and set out some tools by it and Benti pulled out all the rugs and blankets that we owned to lay them upon the floor. We did not speak until Ishara came back, bringing Bilhah with Ruti upon her hip and Dinah leading her sisters behind her to all crowd about me, and behind them came Kala, her hands clasped together as she took in the sight of me, my hair about my face and my mother beside me to show how much I had grown since last we were close to each other. She nodded and did not ask for proof of what Ishara had told her, for she could see for herself.

The ones who had been summoned sat upon the blankets and wine for the women and barley water for the children was passed around, and then Rookheeya made me sit before her again and began to braid my hair once more. Her hands tugged at my head and pulled the plaits thinner and tighter than they had ever been before, but I was not a whining child now and I did not whimper, as my mother whispered into my ear, whispered the story of the tresses of the Fruitful One. It was a story that I had never hear before, and I sat through my discomfort as I grew calmer and quiet in my mind and listened to the story of how, when the gods came to the land, Ishtara let her hair flow out upon the wind and it made the land that her sister Ishti walked upon grow green and lush, and there grew trees and long grass and shrub land, and fruit groves and wheat and barley so that men would be provided for. She walked through the lands after her sister, and whichever way she turned her head the wind blew through it and fertility would come from it.

"But the Destroyer was jealous of the gift that Ishtara had given the land," my mother went on, "and he decided that he would shame her by stealing her hair. So, when there was no light in the sky and the Earth-mother rested beside her spouse, the Master Smith, what do you think he did? Why, he crept up and cut off her hair with a knife, cut off every last strand, and made off with it, and he did it with such care and silence that his theft was only discovered when Ishtara woke with a shorn head. She was distraught and wounded deeply by the loss, a wound so deep that it could not be healed; and she wrapped herself up in veils to cover her bare head and her face so that she might not be known, and she hid herself away from the sight of all in a cave under the hills so deep that even her lord might not reach her. And though Ishti walked through the world and the gods searched for the one who had stolen the Fruitful One's hair they did not find him, for the Destroyer had burned Ishtara's hair in a great fire and delighted as he saw the land wither.

"But Renna the Sorrowful was filled with pity for Ishtara, and by some chance she found her way to where Ishtara had hidden herself and wept for her loss and for the loss of the land. Then Renna sat beside Ishtara and they mourned together, and Renna put her arms about her sister goddess and let her tears fall upon the Earth-mother's poor bald head. And then, what joy! For her tears caused Ishtara's hair to grow once more, and it was as long as it had even been, and as beautiful, and it glowed with her holy power, and the wound within her body and heart was healed. Then they walked out of the cave she had hidden away in and Ishtara looked once more upon the earth, and her hair streamed out over the wasted ground and made it green once more.

"And ever after that time Ishtara keeps her hair braided and covered to save it from theft once more, and at the beginning of the year after Ishti walks across the land she lets it loose to bring greenery to the earth anew, and after every harvest is done she covers it once more and retreats to her cave to wait until her time comes again. And so do we, Adahni, coming to our husbands with our hair loose when we are at our most fertile, retreating from the company of men when our fertility wanes, in a circle that is forever renewed within us."

At last my mother finished her work and all of those about us clapped to see as I moved my head and my hair moved about me as it had never done before, like a curtain of beads. It felt so strange, so cool and so light and it moved through my hands as if it was a batch of snakes that grew from my scalp. I laughed at the sheer pleasure of it, as my mother pulled me back against her, but I ceased to laugh when she took hold of my arms and rested her chin upon my shoulder to keep me against her body, Bilhah seized my right hand, Ishara took my left and Werru and Benti stood over us holding a tray and a lamp. I saw now that Kala was holding a sharp needle, a needle that I had seen Werru holding in the fire when Rookheeya unbound my hair. The midwife smiled at the sight of what must have been upon my face as I shifted in my mother's grip, licking my dry lips.

"Do not quiver so! It is not as if you are being marked as a servant, after all!" And as she pushed the needle slowly and steadily through my right eyebrow and Werru shed light upon her work, Bilhah in turn told me the story of Roshni, a princess of an age ago who saw her father and brothers die in battle and was forced into servitude by their killers, and had her head shaved and a metal bolt thrust through her brow as the mark of a slave. Tarak looked favourably upon her, however, and she found the strength to escape and gather the remnants of her people and lead them against the men who had tried to wipe out her bloodline. She and her army were victorious and defeated their enemies and Roshni became not a princess once more but a queen of Men, and she wore until her dying day the piercing in her brow that she changed from a mark of shame to one of triumph, a mark that was remembered long after she had gone to the life beyond this. I, as a first born daughter and in addition the daughter of an _isha_, should be proud that I had the right to wear such a mark of renown, to show that I would walk for all of my life with dignity and resolve. She slid the ring through the hole in my flesh as she finished the tale, and praised me for keeping so still and quiet as she had worked. My brow swelled with pain but Rookheeya clasped my hands in hers and gave me wine to drink to soothe me, and soon the pain dulled to an ache that I could disregard for the time.

Bilhah comforted me further as the wine did its work by telling me of how she had fared when it had been her turn to receive the right of a first born daughter. "I had to be held down to stop me from struggling when it began, I was so afraid of the pain," she said with great cheer as she wiped the sweat away from my face. "Kala made Rookheeya sit on my legs for fear that I would kick her. She said I sounded like a goat being gutted."

She made sounds through her teeth that made the little ones laugh. Kala said that she remembered all too well, but there had been others who screamed like terrified horses even before she had put the needle in. "Brave girl, in your way. Takes resolve to let someone wield a needle near your eye without flinching."

One that was done, then there came the songs: not the throaty warblings of the men but high, sweet words that sang of the beauty of the earth and the glory of the stars, of the blessings of the Queen of Heaven and the Fruitful One and the Eternal Renewal and the Dancer. Werru brought out star fruit and the sweet cakes that had been made for that day, for it had been the time of the moon for her and Rookheeya and Bilhah, and I tasted them for the first time and I smiled with the rightness of it all, that I should eat such things on such a day. My mother pulled me up to stand in the middle of the circle and we danced together, all the dances that I had ever learned or played and a new one that I was taught as the evening wore on and into night.

It was a strange dance, that one, as we did not lift our feet far from the ground with any step, simply raising and setting them down as we stepped backwards or forwards. We moved our arms in sinuous motions, curling and uncurling like snakes, like strands of loose hair upon the wind. Our hands were graceful as the fingers bent back like a bird's wing in flight and as we bowed and twisted, as we pushed at the air and then shied away. It was not solemn but still slow and joyous as my blood-aunt, pregnant in her early months, and my bond-aunts and even withered Kala joined me - leaving only Benti to clap the beat and keen the music - welcoming me into the sisterhood of women, the ones who had been given the great mystery, the secret of life and the power of the goddesses within us. As I moved past Dinah I saw such longing upon her face that it clawed at my heart, as I stood above her and learned the great dance that Naani surely must have danced to draw Tarak to her in the verdant gardens she ran through so long ago.

And then the Moon began to rise and all the stars began to come alight, and together we all walked out into the darkness. He was full that night and his gleam covered the ground with silver and my shadow stretched out upon the ground behind me. The children sat by the rock wall of our house with the discarded head scarves of my mother and my aunts and Kala in their laps and we began the dance again as the Moon and the stars painted our skin more pale than it had ever been, and glowed upon Kala's grey braids as if they were a precious metal. We danced in a circle, even Benti now with her scars free to the night air. We made no sound and said no word as we moved, never making a wrong step for there could be no mistakes in this dance, only clapping in time and breathing softly and setting our feet down together.

We went on until the Moon had risen higher and the stars were bright and then our bodies ceased to move and the story of the Dancer was finished, told not in words but in movements and grace. Many of the girls had fallen asleep, but Dinah was still awake and had her lower lip between her teeth and her arms wrapped about her knees. The dance was finished but still she longed to join us, her face set as if she were in a trance of desire. Kala soon broke that trance as she bent down and pulled her headscarf from my cousin's grasp, saying as she did so, "Let all who are not women depart from this place, now." I saw outrage on Dinah's face even as she stood up, but Kala had turned to me and was pulling me back into the house. I heard her argue and be silenced by a sharp retort from Bilhah, but I thought more on how the midwife was making me lie down upon the blankets that Benti had now heaped up, and Werru was building up the fire once more. I thought that they might want to pierce some other part of me. I could only nod as Bilhah ran in and kissed me on both cheeks and whispered a blessing from the Blue Spirits for me, and then left to take her daughters home again.

But now there were no sharp thing being held in the fire, only light that Kala might see what she was doing, as she poured some type of resin onto a small dish, and then set light to it so that it smoked and fumed softly. She turned and held the dish out towards me and she spoke over my coughs: "Your last tale for this night, Adahni, is this."

And then she spoke of when the first men and women awoke in the land that would be Rhûn by the will of the gods and how they walked across the earth and found glory in all that they saw, for the land was fertile and visited by rains, and the ones who had awakened had everything that they could wish for and more. But the hearts of Men, Kala said, were filled with questions and desire for newness, and so it did not please them to stay in one place for too long. Many of them left the land in which they had first drawn breath and some of them journeyed to the West and settled there, and their skin grew white, and in later ages they met the long lived ones and served them in their wars and spoke their tongue, and some of them ruled mighty kingdoms, but all of their greatness was in the end destroyed or came to nothing but an empire of dust and decay. Some went to the South, and they found rich hot woodland with strange stars in the heavens and great beasts as tall as hills with large horns that they tamed and harnessed to work, and they divided into many tribes and lived well off the land, but they were forever under the sway of first the Men of the West and then the One of the South, fighting wars and dying for reasons not of their own making. And some went to the North and came to the darkness and the cold, and what they found and what they did came into no stories of the good people who lived beside the Sea of Rhûn.

But some men and women chose to stay where they were, and they lived on the green hills and herded goats and sheep, all unknowing of the gods who had made them and called them into being. And long after they had awakened, but still many ages ago, a youth and a maiden – husband and wife, brother and sister, it is not known – walked out one day and came to a field of poppies, bright red under the blue sky, and they were tired and lay and rested and slept, and presently they dreamed, for poppies were a gift of both the Master of Dreams and the Mistress of Healing. The youth dreamed of things that he might touch and shape, of the things that could be changed and made to benefit Men. He dreamed of his hands as they planned how water might be displaced and brought up from the ground and how great houses might be built, how mountains might be climbed and paths made. He dreamed that his body took the form of a horse and ran across the earth as it shaped around him. And he smiled at his dreams as they grew ever more beautiful and strange.

The maiden dreamed of other things, of things unseen and unknown but still true. She dreamed of her _lao, _her spirit, as it flew from her body in the shape of a butterfly and over the earth, dancing upon the winds and wondering at the path of the Sun and the stars, seeing the lives of creatures and Men and long lived ones below her and the differences between their spirits. She saw life and she saw death and she saw that which made them what they were, and at last she flew beyond this world and came to Loren's garden. There she alighted upon the hands of the Master of Dreams and twin keeper of souls, and Loren kissed her softly and told her that she had seen the truth and found what she was, and that she was his.

He sent her back to her body, Kala told me, as the smoke curled about me and made me drowsy, and she woke at the same time as the youth, and they went back to their people, knowing that they were changed. The youth began to teach other men what he had learned in craft and skill, but the maiden told the other women of what she had seen when she slept and left her body, and she gathered the poppies and took the resin from the flowers and burned it so that they might breathe the smoke and see visions of the nature of the world. Many of them did so, and they saw snatches of what they would later know as the marks of the gods, symbols and strange pictures. And some were like the maiden; for as they breathed the smoke they fell asleep and their spirits left their bodies and travelled the blue sky.

"And since then," the midwife finished, "whenever a girl reaches womanhood, she must breathe in the smoke of the poppy and learn of the one who has claimed her as their own. Each of us is born under the sign of a god, but that god is not always our own and we are not always theirs. To learn the name of your secret divine one, whose name you shall acknowledge only on your deathbed, you must look into the smoke. Adahni, born from the womb of Rookheeya, your time has come with the blood of the moon. Breathe now the gift of Loren, and know who you truly are." And with that she placed the dish by my side where I now lay, and drew back to stand with my mother.

The smoke was thick by now, and to me it smelled more terrible than incense. If it had been my choice I would not have lain there and breathed it in, but it was as much a part of my new womanhood as my changed hair and my eyebrow ring and the dance that I had learned. I kept myself there on the blankets, and I do not remember when I surrendered to the fumes, or what followed in the wake of the smoke.

I only remember waking again, slowly and heavily with the light of the afternoon, pulling my body out of the blankets that had been heaped over me as I listened to the hurry of footsteps as more than one person left our house. There was an awful taste in my mouth and my skin and eyes were clammy and the itch had returned between my legs, and I still felt the smoke inside my head as I felt bony fingers that could only belong to Kala take hold of my chin and lift up my head.

"What did you dream?" she asked me, her face close to mine and her breath hot upon my cheek. But I could not answer her, for the sunlight had pierced my head and dispersed the last fragments of the smoke, and with them the memories of what I had seen while I slept, clutch at them though I might. Like the dust of the deserts it had blown away with Kala's voice and I was left to sit up onto my heels, to open and close my mouth with nothing to say, save to ask where Rookheeya and my bond-aunts were.

"I sent them away as you were waking. I alone must hear your words. Tell me what you dreamt," she told me. "Few remember their visions, but always they recall one thing, one part that was brightest and most clear – and after two days of sleep, you surely saw something."

I hardly heard her last words, for as she spoke of something bright and clear one thread of the smoke curled and writhed back into my thoughts, and I spoke of what it had shown me. I told her of a great gate, greater than the temple, greater than the hills, greater than the sky, greater than the world it seemed; and I told her of how somewhere deep in the dream I had stood from afar and looked upon the gate where others would feel fear and horror, and I felt only awe and wonder. Kala listened to me solemnly, and when I was finished she let go of my chin and sat back on her own heels.

"Laban." Her voice was softer than it had ever been. "To see the gate to is see the symbol of Laban. You are claimed by the Lord of Souls." She smiled to see my face, as I thought of the hopes of my mother and my aunts dashed, for how could I be a midwife if I was, as she said, a chosen servant of the god of Death? Could Ishtara not have chosen me, or Ishti, or even Naani, so that I might have some chance at this my only chance? "Do not look so misery-ridden! He chooses far more servants than you might think, they just do not admit to it. And surely you do not think your Ishara vile for paying service to him? He is justice and rightness as well as the keeper of the courts, the bridge between life and beyond it, and those whom he claims have that understanding as well.

"What is a good midwife if she does not see or understand the role that we have? We too are bridges between life and death, we know what price a woman can and would pay to birth a child, and we know what it takes to draw them back from darkness or to save their infant. We know the perils that a mother faces, perishing in a river of black blood, withering in the days after the birth, dying with a scream upon their lips, and we know what the reward is: a baby's laugh, a daughter to teach, a son to grow into a fine man. And we know that there are times when we must choose between saving a woman and saving the one within her, and we know that we must decide at those times. That is our triumph, and that is our sorrow. And you, Adahni, you have it in you to understand this full well, in time."

The blunt words at the end of her speech confused me, and I asked her outright if she truly meant to take me on as an apprentice. She placed her hand upon my shoulder and told me that yes, she would, she would take me in and teach me what I must know in order to become a midwife. She said too that I would go with her to her house this very day. She called out to those who waited outside and said that she would take me, and they fairly crowed with triumph as they came in again, Rookheeya and Werru asking me brightly, without expecting answer, which god must have chosen me to make Kala want to have me as her pupil, and Benti and Ishara staying back from their questions but still smiling for me.

How quickly then they wrapped the scarf about my head once I had changed my child's tunic for a longer robe and had rinsed my skin with water, showing me how it was held in place and making certain that the two braids were visible. And how much I did cling to them all when the time had arrived that I should go to Kala's home that I might learn from her the craft that she had deemed would be mine! I was still between childhood and womanhood, and I could not countenance the thought of living beyond my mother's gaze, living in a house where she and my aunts were not. I no longer saw them as truly perfect, now that I was more grown and saw their faults as well as their virtues, but they were all that I had known, my guides and my teachers and so very dear to me, and now I had to leave them behind for another. And for all that Kala told me that she would let me come back every sixth day to see them, and my teaching would be over in time, I could not help but cry when I looked back as I walked away with her and watched my mother's face as she stood with her bond-sisters at the doorway. Unlike Werru she did not weep to see me leave her, but her smile was over bright as if it was all that stood between her and a deluge.

She waved to me until I could see her no longer, and remembrance of her words of love when we parted were enough to keep me weeping until Kala had brought me into her home.

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	6. Wielding a knife

**Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR. **

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Warning: References to childbirth, various ways to get the baby out, and dissection. A whole lot of dissection.

**Also reference to sexual organs and the use there of.**

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Once in a city where there were fewer hills and more tall buildings there was a rich merchant called Uttor who had two wives, one short in stature and one as tall as he, and both of them beautiful. The short one was called Kika and the tall one Nepherru, and between them they bore Uttor five sons and one daughter as tall as her mother. And the mothers were happy, or as happy as two wives who share a husband can be, and the children were happy too in the large house they lived in. Perhaps Uttor did not love all of them equally, or as much as he should, but that did not matter to his children and his wives for they had everything that they might desire.

Uttor grew ever wealthier, and he could send his children to great callings. His third born son became a priest of the Almighty One and the second born son was sent to a school of healing for the physicians were renowned in that city; and his daughter was sent there as well. For she desired to become a midwife, which was a noble and respected profession for a woman, and because Uttor had many sons he was not spiteful towards his daughter and agreed that she might attend as well. And so every day the girl would put on her veil and take her bag with her food in it, and she would walk with her brother, Loror, to the school of medicine.

There they learned alongside other youths and some few maidens, of the body and what lay beneath the skin of many creatures, of the bones and the organs, of the vessels that carried blood and the way in which the heart sent out the liquid of life. They watched as their teachers cut open dead animals before them, and held the sharp knives and parted skin and flesh themselves. They sliced apart human bodies as well, those that had died of wasting diseases upon the streets or those who had promised themselves to the school when their spirits left their houses. The girl cut up the body of a pregnant young woman and gazed upon what it would be her task to preserve, and ignored the whispers that the corpse had been the disfavoured concubine of one of the teachers. It mattered not to her, for all the dead were dead alike, no matter what marks they had upon them. She took out the baby from its mother and sewed it back inside her once she was done, and she did not see the body in the cold rooms again.

She and her brother read texts that had been written by men and women of long before that described what they observed, and she made careful drawings of what she saw as she peeled away what hid the workings of life. She examined pictures of the growth of the baby in the womb and the swell of a woman's stomach, and what took place when a child was born. She was taken to some births and watched as a child was born and its mother died. When she walked to and fro with Loror she would look at the forms of the people about her and dwell on the thoughts of the muscles working to make them move and the blood that seethed through them. And most of all she would think of the spirit that gave them life from the Almighty One, though not of the nature of the spirit itself.

Soon she was deemed worthy to become a midwife and received the rank of woman physician, and because she was of good standing and had much talent she was called upon to deliver the children of the rich and the noble. She was content in her work and brought money to her household, and she was respected and favoured and some men asked for her as a first wife, for to have such an important and gifted woman as a bride was a mark of great renown.

She might have married and lived out her life in wealth and privilege, but then demands from the West came.

Young and unmarried though she was, the maiden was not taken to be a companion to those young men that went; she merely watched as other, poorer girls were led behind the men. But she turned away as her eldest and fourth eldest brothers clad themselves in red and marched away with the soldiers to be high ranked leaders, and her favourite brother Loror went with them to be a healer of war wounds, and they did not meet again under the Sun. She wept but only where none could see her, for their service was considered a glorious thing and something to be praised and lauded. She cursed the One of the South who demanded her people's sons and she scorned those sons who would so willingly die so far from their home and the loving eyes of their mothers, and the god who let them be taken from her.

And there were more losses to be had. Kika knew as only a mother could know that her sons would never return from the West, and in utter despair she could do nothing but turn to the poppy smoke. This she found in plenty, a pleasure and a release from care and worry, and Uttor bought it for her willingly if it would only stop her tears. She lost herself steadily to dreams and did not seem aware when Uttor took her to his bed once more, or when she carried his new child, or even when she gave birth to twins and they were placed at her breast. She gave in to the _di-ad, _the 'half light' which so often comes to those who give themselves utterly to the smoke, and she became as a shell that walked and spoke and yet had ceased to truly live.

Nepherru was not so ready to fall. When Kika did not feed her new children she took them to her own breast until a wet nurse could be found, for she was still fertile and strong and was herself expecting once more. She turned to her gods that she had brought with her from her homeland, and determined to bring them to her daughter. The mother went went to the maiden as she cried for her brothers, and the elder comforted the younger and reminded her of her sacred calling. She told her that it was hard at times to understand the will of the Eternal Father, as she named the Almighty One, but she would find him through understanding his servants and those he had sent to carry his message to the world. She told her so many things and last of all she said farewell, for she knew that her daughter was now a woman and that they, too, would not meet again when she departed, as she surely must.

The maiden dried her tears and packed up her tools and most precious things and she left the house of her father when he was gone and could not stop her, dropping her veil to the ground and treading on it as she went. She named herself an _isha, _reborn in her sorrow and loss in the wars, and she joined a caravan and left for lands where the people would not think it good and right to send their sons and daughters away to die. She came to places where the Almighty One was deemed kinder and not so cruel, and there were other holy figures besides that One, gods and goddesses and spirits. She learned of the mystery of the goddesses and how to unlock the pleasure in her body, and of the Queen of Heaven and the Lord of Souls. She found healing methods that she scoffed at and traits that she adopted, adding to her store of knowledge all the while and to the contents of her pack, the drawings and notes that she made and the bones she picked up to clean and soak and preserve.

Years and more years after she had left her home and the eyes of her mother behind, she came to a tribe that lived by a great body of water with a wondrous temple set on a hill to great the rising Sun. She knew that here was where she would spend the rest of her days and she charmed the town elders so that they gave her a house to live in and she spread the word that here resided the best midwife in all the land of Rhûn. And slowly, like a thread of water moving down the outside of a cold jar brought out into the Sun, the women began to come to her; first in curiosity at this sallow woman from far away, and then in confidence.

She worked marvels, saving babies and mothers where other midwives could have done little or nothing, as she did very early on when she presided over the labour of the first and most loved wife of one of the richest merchants in the village. After two days the baby was nearly at the door but then became stuck and his mother, too small and narrow hipped and tired to push this large boy out of her, was near to collapse; the midwife shocked all those about her when she finally took up a sharp knife and opened the way for the baby, front to back, and reached in to pull him out. If the mother had died or even grown sick I don't know what the one who had held the knife would have done; but through care and craft the cuts that the midwife had made did not go bad and even healed. The merchant and his wife were grateful beyond words, of course, and they rewarded her greatly. She ate well for months after that child-bed.

A few moons later she delivered twin boys to another rich woman who had been unable to carry a baby to full term for years and to whom she had prescribed a special diet, and her fame was made. After that whenever a woman was near her time she would send for Kala the midwife; Kala who had delivered so many important men of the tribe, Kala who knew all the secrets of birth and death, Kala, who could cut a woman open and pluck out her child and sew her up again without harming her.

I knew very little of all this until Kala herself told me, of course. Girls are not even allowed into the room where their mother or any other woman is giving birth until they have bled for the first time, and all this took place years before my mother was born. Before the decision to have Kala take me on as an apprentice was made there had rarely been any talk of her in our house, for of course her services were no longer needed by my mother and bond-aunts. Bilhah had spoken of her from time to time, saying that Kala had told her that she needed to eat more of this or less of that to keep herself and the baby she was carrying healthy. But whenever the time came for her to give birth Rookheeya would run over to her house with Ishara, and my bond-aunt would bring back my cousins so that they would have something to eat and somewhere to sleep without hearing their mother scream, and we would wait to be called back when it was all over and the midwife had left. So Kala was a mystery even after our first proper meeting, for while I was told about what she did while she lived among us none really knew what sort of a person she was or the truly great things that she had achieved in her long lifetime.

There is a proverb in Rhûn: _A horse is taught by its dam to be a horse, but a man teaches it what sort of horse it should be. _More simply but in more words, it means that to achieve anything in life you need to be surrounded by more than just family; you need friends and most importantly teachers who can show you the world beyond your mother's arms. A mare nourishes her foal and shows it how to feed and how to run, but without a man's influence a horse would do nothing but mate and graze its life away. Under the whip of a trainer, that same horse could run in races and win prizes, or be taught to fight with hooves and teeth and carry a warrior into battle, or be the fine steed of a rich prince. The mare brings her offspring into the world, but something else makes that foal useful.

This, I think, is what my time under Kala was like. My mother and my four aunts taught me all the things that a good child and a good woman should be, but Kala was the first person who gave me something to strive desperately for, a distant goal to achieve and a prize to win. She led me ever onward and constantly made me try and retry, scolding and praising me as was needed. No one had ever demanded as much of me as she did, and there were nights when I would lie on my mat and weep into my blanket so that she would not hear. I feared that I would never be able to bear such a great weight and such a duty as Kala was preparing me for.

But I stayed, for what she taught me held and pulled me, like a fish hook in my brain. And Kala was so strange and foreign and enticing that I longed to know all that there was to know about her and what she had seen and done.

I asked her about the places she had gone to. She told me of a great city built upon a flat-topped and hollow centred mountain with many fountains and gardens, where they used strange pumps to bring up water from deep below the earth to cheat the rains all year round. She told me of another town, built above and behind surely the biggest waterfall in the world, where everyone went about in great cloaks pearled with mists of rain, made from the fur of woolly deer. She told me of cities surrounded by fields where they grew flowers for dye, or trees for fruit, or plants that gave a bounty of white grains. She told me of the horse festival, the _Ran-Kiri,_ on the plains where sand and earth came together, where traders and owners of the finest horse flesh in all the East gather with their charges, and where there are chariot races and fleet races and buying and selling for days and days on end. She would bring out small books made from thin sheets of mashed wood and I saw the pictures that she had made and the words that she had written when she was young and sorrowful and loose in a world she longed to catch and hold to her.

I asked her if she had found it hard to travel, a woman all alone, even if she was an _isha. _She laughed, and told me of places where it was the _men_ who went about with veils on their faces, veiled in precious lucky blue, and the women who left their skin open to the air. She told me of how there were nomads who travelled in great groups where the men took care of the herds and the women held sway in the tents, and looked into the future through their poppy visions to see where they should go next to find good ground and sweet water. She told me that in her home city and the land about it the Sun was so hot that people wore white muslin or silk and little else; that children, boys and girls alike, ran around naked until they were eight or nine, and that both men and women cut their hair close to their scalps and wore beautiful wigs if they were rich and went around with cropped heads if they were not. She showed me how she still kept her own hair short under her headscarf, though it was now grey, and the simple but important wig she had worn for the birthing room when she was a girl.

She even told me that there had been a man or two in the years since she had left her old life, and while she had become an _isha _she had not become 'dead below the waist'. I laughed back in humour and in shock, for it took a strange man to bed an _isha, _who by all rights should be celibate.

I asked her, very warily indeed, if she had loved her mother, even though she had left her, something I could hardly dare to think of. I remember that she paused in whatever she was doing to think awhile before she answered. "I loved her, and I think that she loved me. But she did not understand me. No, how could she? I was a bread-winner, she was a home keeper. We cared about such different things."

In a land where a daughter begins to learn to cook while still at the breast Kala was a curiosity; it showed how far apart from her mother she had been that she had never even learned to make bread or beer, tasks which servants had always done in her household. She claimed to know how to weave and sew, but everything that other women made for themselves she bought at the market stalls. When I first came to her she would buy hot rabbit stew or smoked fish and take it back to her house and we would eat it there, doing none of the cooking ourselves and only washing the bowls afterward to take back. Her tunics she wore until they were worn out, and then rather than patch them she would buy new ones and she would use the yellow scraps at births to soak up blood and afterbirth. She was a woman who made nothing but books which she would scratch letters in and then make me copy them time and again.

The drawings she had drawn or brought with her made me stare. I saw sketches of bones that made up the body, and the skull grinned at me from every page it was drawn upon. I would prod my cheeks and under my chin feeling for the planes of my face, I would run my fingers over my skin to find the pulse of my blood. I saw organs I did not even know that I had and where they were in my body. I blushed when I saw the drawings that looked so like the three cornered month cakes all bleeding women ate, and Kala laughed when I squeaked and looked away from the pictures of naked men. She said it was just as well I didn't want a husband, for I'd surely run away screaming when he undressed on the wedding night and came at me all ready. My face boiled with shame, and I looked and looked until I saw only objects of curiosity to be studied, nothing more. I drew them in detail, larger, at the peak of their use, filled and empty alike. I drew copied babies in the womb and did not ask whether they were drawn from life.

I learned what Kala had done as a girl instead of learning a woman's arts when I heard her speak about the house. The first time I heard her speak in a language so unlike any I had heard in the market place, I thought she or I had gone mad. A merchant has to be fluent in more tongues than his own and Uttor had firmly believed that his children should learn the same lessons that he had. As a child of a woman from the Sea and a man of further South Kala could speak in both languages by the time she was steady on her feet, but her prowess did not stop there. She learned the common tongue of the Haradrim and even some words of what the people of the West called Westron, the language that had so confused me, a strange dialect that I could never master despite her best efforts. When she went to the school of medicine she took to heart the ancient language of the doctors and healers that still clung to the bones and the organs of the bodies she cut up, and she taught me that not through books but by wielding a knife. I would cut and she would ask me the name of what the knife revealed, and ask again and more until I remembered it, and only then would she allow me to cut further.

We began with fish, for fish are plentiful and uncostly by the sea. Every morning we would go down to the docks and Kala would buy two fresh fish, and we would take them back to her home and she would place one in a cooling jar and sit and watch me cut up the other. She would demand the names of each organ and each bone, and she would scold me when I let the knife tremble for I should always have a steady hand when wielding a blade. Once I had cut the fish up as well as I could I would roast the meat and we would eat it with lentils or salad or some such that Kala had bought in the market along with the fish. In the noon she would make me copy words or drawings she had shown me the day before from memory, and then as the dusk drew on she would cut the chilled second fish apart – as skilfully as any butcher; how I watched her with envy! I would cook that, and we ate rather better than we did early in the day, and with far fewer bones to pick out of our mouths.

We did this for many days until my hand was steady and I could cut the fish apart well enough to please Kala, and she told me as we ate what was to be our last fish that on the morrow we would move on to a new carcass. I was glad, for I had grown tired of eating white meat every day and every night, and when the next day Kala bought two fine young does with the fur still on them I was very pleased indeed, for rabbit was one of my favourite meats. But I soon grew to dislike it! Taking one apart was enough to send me into a frenzy; there were so many tendons and muscles to sort through that Kala called it unlacing its robes. I would wake on my blanket and dread having to get up and go through the horrid business yet again whenever I knew that Kala would buy new rabbits. I began to sweat when I picked up the knife, and once more I could hardly hold it steady. Kala grew impatient with me and I feared more and more that she would turn me away and send me back to my mother, for I could not even cut up a rabbit to please her. But I kept on and kept on until in time I could unlace the carcass she put before me and name all that I cut away, and she praised me as she rarely did.

She brought me larger bodies to cut up as I grew more adept; full grown rabbit does and female hares from the market, and the bodies of yellow vixens and sand rats from the tanner who stripped off their pretty skins for bags and belts and gave up the carcasses for little or nothing. Once I rose in time to find her setting a dead dog with its head smashed in on the table where we did our work, very excited. She told me that the dog had been pregnant but that it had been killed by a stray kick from a mule, and she had claimed the now worthless remnants for me. It was not so easy for me to cut up that body, for it seemed worth more than to be peeled apart in such a manner, and it did not seem right to me to poke into and search for the treasure the bitch had carried inside her that she must have thought so safe.

But together we found the womb, for Kala had promised the bitch's master that we would count the pups inside so that he might demand their cost from the owner of the mule along with restitution for his favourite dog's life. There were seven of them in all, four of them males and three females all together and as lifeless as their mother, curled into themselves and dead. We took them out with her organs and dried them, and then we put them back inside her body and bound them inside with cloth and gave her back to her master so that he could organise for her to be preserved. When at last he died she would go into the grave with him, his servant in death as she had been in life.

I never forgot that dead dog and her dead pups. And I did not forget the time when Kala brought me to the table where something lay on it, covered, and she pulled off the cloth and I saw that it was a hand, a human hand with the skin removed so that I could see all that lay beneath, tendons and muscles and bones. I had seen things with their skin off for more than a year by then but to see this arm, cut off neatly below where the elbow would have been, cracked my hardened mind. It was a terrible thing to be surprised by, far worse than any skinned animal half opened, and it had been partly crushed too. I had to run out of the room as my stomach sent my meal back into my mouth. Kala only smiled as she waited for me to return, as she knew I would. And I watched as she pointed out each joint and knuckle, jabbing here and there with the knife. When she was done she wrapped the arm up and sent it back to the man who had lost it the day before, as if she were returning a cooking pot.

I did not tell my mother or my aunts about the arm. I think that the only one who knew about that dreadful morning other than we two were the man who had lost it and the doctor who had cut it off when it was crushed under a rock. Kala lamented that the tribe frowned on cutting dead bodies apart or open unless it was for a funeral and very few would let us have their dead to practise on. She had not minded so much before I was apprenticed to her, but now that she was teaching me she needed to find me human bodies. She might have gone to the elders with this problem but she was too proud and wilful to ask for their help, and she did not quite dare to offer families money so that we might use their lost one as a tool for a lesson.

Clever woman that she was, she made a deal with one of the embalmers so that we could go with them to see how they did their work, especially if their dead subject was a woman – women, Kala said, should be my particular attention. I never told my mother or aunts of that either; nor did anyone see what we did or where we went, for the embalmers always worked at night. I had always thought that it would hurt dreadfully to keep secrets from them, but I found that it was quite easy; easier than telling them that I watched as the dead were cut open and preserved and prepared for burial. As Kala had promised I went back to them every sixth day, and I looked forward to those days, but I dreaded them. I always had so much to speak to them about, but as my time with Kala grew longer and longer I had so much to quarrel with them about too. I often grew impatient with them and their views on the world about us now that I knew so much more of the land outside the borders of the village, and of the nature of the gods. Kala taught me many things, but she also shook my faith.

I questioned them incessantly about the fairness of the gods when they allowed such dreadful things to happen to the people who worshipped them. It was more than the crumbling disease or death in childbed that made me so angry; it was every ailment I had ever heard of from Kala, all the things that might go wrong with our frail bodies, our bodies that began to perish as soon as we began to live. What kind of loving deity would put their treasured children inside constantly dying sacks of meat? I remember that I hurt Werru deeply when I did what not even Ishara had done and called her belief in the Weaver's great design foolish. She grew angry and began to protest; I did not think that I was doing something wrong when I said that by believing in it she saw herself as still a slave to the will of others, which was a stupid and useless thing to do.

She hit me for it, Werru who had never struck me before, tears starting in her eyes, shrieking how I dared to say such a thing. The pain and anger of the blow unloosed my tongue and I said that I did so because there must be no gods, or if there were then they did not care about us or what we did because they were as cruel as the One of the South. Rookheeya slammed a bowl down so hard that she broke it and told me that if I believed this then I might as well leave and not come back, rather than say such things to her and my bond-aunts. And I screamed that I would do just that, and I turned and ran from my home, wiping my eyes and sniffing deeply so that none would see my dripping eyes and nose. I hated my mother then as I had never hated anything, and I called her bad names all the way back to Kala's house through the gasps for breath that hurt so much, with insults aplenty thrown in for Werru. I promised myself that I really would not go back and that I would not beg for forgiveness as a good daughter should, for I had done nothing wrong.

And I kept my word, too. I did not go back in the days after that, nor did my mother send to Kala's house for me. My mother was a proud woman, and I was her daughter, and she had taught her arrogance to me and I had learned it well. I did not want to go out in case I met her or one of my aunts and I drew pictures so hard that I tore Kala's precious paper. I did not want my guilt to hurt, but it did hurt so badly I felt as if I could claw and scratch but never pull it out of me. Kala soon grew curious about what had happened, and though I did not tell her anything of it she found out in her own way, or maybe one of my aunts told her in the market place. She told me one evening that she was taking me back there even if she had to drag me by my hair, and she led me by the hand like a sulky child.

"She's your mother, girl," she told me, "and you're the only daughter she'll ever have. You're the only daughter any of them will _ever_ have. Perhaps they're not perfect to you any more, and perhaps you'll quarrel, but if you turn away from them it'll undo you. You're not like me, thanks to the gods. You'll never leave your mother while she lives."

She watched with my aunts as I walked to where my mother and Werru stood by the fire space and asked, doing my best not to cry, for them please to forgive my words and the thoughts behind them. Rookheeya let tears fall from her eyes instead. She told me that she didn't care what my thoughts were as long as I did not hurt others with them, that it tore her heart apart when we argued. Werru told me that she forgave me too, and that she was so sorry for striking me, and I forgave her. I felt as if a sore deep inside me had been lanced, and the pain brought draining and such relief.

I quarrelled with them again after that, of course. For as long as we lived we had arguments; we were not a family in a story, we were real. I was still growing, and they had still seen more than I had. I grew to like debating with Kala and Ishara and Rookheeya but I never again challenged their beliefs, nor did they try to tell me what to believe. They left me to find my own way to deal with the problems that now made up the gods and goddesses. Benti told me she would wait for me to go with her to the temple again, but no more than that.

There was a snake, once. Kala found it coiled around one of her herb pots and called me to look at it; I came running with a stick but there was no need to keep it away from us. It was dead, had been dead for a while. I don't know why it had chosen to die there in the cool and the shade but it had known, and it lay in the dark with open eyes that never blinked and with ants crawling over it. Kala brushed away the ants and picked it up and told me to get another pot and fill it with earth, and she placed the snake's tail in its mouth and buried the dead circle in that pot and planted a herb over it. When I took the plant out of the pot months later to transfer it to a larger home there were the snake's bones and skin, but its flesh had gone into the earth and been tangled in the roots of the herb that had feasted on it.

That was the truth of the snake besides its renewal, the truth of my whole apprenticeship, that the weakness of flesh spilled life out like a broken water skin.

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Warning: Copious gratuitous author's notes following.

I based part of Adahni's training on what I had learned of high class Greek midwives: that they were expected to be highly trained in

**obstetrics and**** gynaecological anatomy. And often the only way to do that was to cut things up. A lot.**

**Religion in Rhûn is a rather complicated affair, as religion often is. What Adahni doesn't go into greatly is the fact that what religion you follow in the East depends on where you live. The area around the Sea of Rhûn has different preferences in different settlements, but they're mostly based on the idea that, while there is a creative force from which everything came - i.e. Eru Illuvatar to us readers - they prefer to worship more tangible (relatively speaking) figureheads, the Valar turned gods. The nomads of the plains - the bit between where Mirkwood ends and Rhun begins, or the Brownlands on the Tolkein map, because you don't have a desert right next door to a forest after all - regard the Valar not so much as gods as spirits of the very world itself, whom they don't exactly worship but take care not to offend. They build shrines upon small hills at which they make offerings but no temples (which makes sense as no one wants to stay and look after a place which is visited only occasionally and likely has no food source; they live mostly on the meat of their flocks and what they trade.)**

**Slightly further South, religion becomes less of a pantheon and more worship of a single deity; who that deity is again depends on where you are. The city where Kala came from, while supplying warriors for Sauron's army rather more readily than Adahni's people, doesn't regard him as a god; they worship a rather puritanical version of Eru, 'the Almighty One'. Sauron ain't too happy about that, but as long as they do what he wants he leaves them alone on that point. Further South and East still – the short answer is that Men **_**do**_** worship him, the long answer is that he's an evil overlord who happens to be a rebel Maia; what did you expect? **

**There are also three distinctions of relation to the gods around the Sea, which the story will never really go into either but which you might want to know. The Rhûn year – in that part of the land, at least – has fourteen months, and each month is ruled by one of the gods, even Laban and Renna, although their months are called 'The Unlucky Days'. As such, people will say you're born in the month of so and so, like a star sign, and you can be given a name not quite like the name of the god of that month i.e. Adahni is named after Adah, so a few letters were added to the goddess's name; Ishara is named for Ishtara so a letter is removed. Usually such names are only reserved for first born children, but if a child is particularly remarkable, such as being born feet first or with the cord wrapped around their neck and surviving, they get named in such a manner as well. People might choose to worship their month god when they grow up, but sometimes like Ishara they choose not to. It's like saying you're a Capricorn but not believing in astrology. **

**There is no particular restriction on which god you give most allegiance to in public – for example, a fisherman would not be prevented from praying to Naani the Dancer instead of the god more linked with his trade, Hee-Un. However the name of your secret god, revealed to you when you reach puberty by various methods (such as drugging you up to the ears), is something you must never mention to anyone. This particular relationship is rather tricky to describe: the closest thing would be cause and effect. The theory is that the god claims you at your very conception and gives you a gift unique to them that becomes part of your character, such as mathematical proficiency or prophecy. And supposedly when you die their name should be the last thing you say, to inform them that one of their servants will be arriving soon. Creepy? Oh, yes.**

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Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress!**


	7. Where there is life

**Disclaimer: I do not own LOTR, nor The Red Tent, which inspired this and from which some of the names are taken.**

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_Warning:_ Rated for more childbirth, more ways of how to get the baby out, what the baby's covered in when it comes out, what the baby _does_ when it comes out etc. Midwife stuff. I've tried not to be too graphic, but basically it's talking about something spurting out of something else.

**Also, apologies to any midwives, doctors, medical students and anyone else who reads this and sees that I've gotten something wrong. I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but I've never actually been present at a birth (thank goodness, and yes, I **_**am**_** aware of the irony) and have had to rely on reading various sources to get the right descriptions. If – heaven forbid! – I do make an error, please tell me so and I will gratefully correct it.**

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A woman in the village never gave birth alone, unless she was very unlucky. When the news was sent out that the labour had begun her friends and neighbours would come running to her side so that they could try to sooth her and give her courage, so that they could wipe her forehead and hold her hand when the pain came. The room could be so crowded that Kala would often banish all but the woman's closest companions so that she could do her work with more ease, and whenever someone left the room to get something she would be plied with questions. They would tug at her from all sides like dogs on a hunt ripping apart a fox, desperate for news of the mother and the baby and made savage by it.

There was always an order to the cluster about the women, I do remember that. If the woman's mother was still alive she would support her in her labour, if the mother was dead it would be her oldest sister, as Bilhah had done for Rookheeya when I was born. If the woman was a concubine she would give birth on the knees of the chief wife of her husband and the baby could by rights go to the older woman. And if the woman was too weak to stand upon the bricks, they all would group about her and hold her up so that she all but dangled from their hands like a doll. They would coo and cry with her and try to drown out her pain, and they would praise her and tell her how well she was doing, even if she had laboured for days and was screaming at them to go and throttle each other.

All mothers screamed at one birthing or another, certainly when it was their first time and their bodies forced their child out of them. There was so much that Kala could not do, for if we gave the women drugs strong enough to fully take away the pain then they would not push or do anything to help themselves. I learned to close my ears to their shrieks and think only of my task, but it was hard, so hard. They would howl and beg the goddesses to hear their cries and take away their torment. They would weep in agony, sobbing upon the floor, or they would curse and bellow and threaten all those about them. Some gritted their teeth, too proud to cry out, and fainted from the pain, and some poor women - exhausted and nearly dead from their agony - would plead for us to kill them so that they would suffer no more, and sometimes they would die from the torture with no aid from us. We would cut and pull their children from their twisted bodies and they would make no more complaints in this world.

But we did what we could. We would show them how to breathe in and out in the right way so that they would not gasp for air. We would pull their hair back and mop their faces. We would massage their skin to make it soften and grow suppler, so that it would not tear when the time came for the child to be born. We would make certain that they were not too hot or too cold and we would keep their lips wet with cold water. We would do everything to make them comfortable and calm so that they would not cause themselves pain or fear. We would talk. We were there for the benefit of everyone in the room, not merely for the sake of the mother.

Kala told me once, if I remember right, "We must be empresses when it comes to birth, priestesses, links between this world and the next. We have to act as if nothing surprises us, as if we always know what's going to happen next. I was taught that when I put on my midwife's wig, I should put on a mask as well. When you're attending a rich woman you must be her equal. Same for a poor woman. And we keep the other women occupied. If they're spoiled concubines and first wives they want to be entertained while they're there, and if they're peasant women they want something to take their minds off their neighbour's screams."

When Kala took me to my first birthing room, she told me quite plainly that I would do nothing unless she asked it of me, and that I was to sit and talk to the women and the mother that would be. I said that yes, of course I would, what else could I have said? But once we went inside the house of the wealthy family who had summoned us, and were shown into the bed chambers of the new bride of the family's son, we were met with the howls of the girl who was younger than me. I had seen her before in her riches when we had passed each other by in the streets, but I did not envy her now and I would never have changed places with her. I wondered how I was to talk quietly with her when she could hardly stop squealing enough to draw breath, and when she rolled about on the bed clutching her heaving belly.

It was quite terrible. It frightened me. I had never heard someone in so much pain before. She became less like a woman and more like an animal in her pain, an animal trapped by what was trying to come out of her. I wanted to help her, but I was not certain how, and I was afraid. I knew that she might die; it seemed to me that she looked like a goat or sheep about to be slaughtered. It was horrible. I tasted something harsh at the back of my throat, the iron taste of fear.

Kala was quite blunt about our calling, but I never stopped wondering at how she changed whenever she stepped into the room where a woman was labouring. She would kneel by the blanket or bed with such ease, and every gesture she would make with her long fingers would be elegant, as if she were dancing. She would speak in an archaic dialect, soothing and sweet, as if she brought a folktale into the room with her very presence. Even when she wielded the sharp knife or the forceps it was as if she handled the most precious of musical instruments, about to make wondrous music. I could only imagine how lovely and mysterious she must have looked when she was young and practiced her arts, in that great towered city which she never told me the name of. She did this now and I stared at my first sight of my teacher becoming this charming, enchanting creature, drawing the attention of the women who flocked to her side with relief.

She began to attend to the lower half of her body so that she could see how far along she was in labour and nodded me towards the top of the bed, so I swallowed iron and went and sat by the girl's head, beside her mother. Those two did not have much to say to each other, so I began to ask the trapped one questions; she ignored me at first to ask shrilly what Kala was doing to her but she had more reply from me than my teacher and so she began to listen to me. As her breathing grew calmer and her hand found mine, I learned that her name was Edira and that she would be afraid if she were not so filled with pain. I did not know what to say to this, but I could not lose her confidence when I had gained it so quickly. I was never good at talking, for I never knew what to say. I had never needed to know what to say, for I had always been surrounded by people who had loved me and who would not be offended by what I said.

In the end, I told her a story. It is not very well known, but I have always liked it and tried to tell it anew. I love to think of it still, even now. It went something like this:

There was the Sun, and there was the Moon, and each followed each other across the sky and lit up the land. And when their work was done they would sink down beyond the far off sea and travel under the earth to rise up in the East for their next journey across the sky.

Once the Blue Spirits had gone to the end of the world to see the Moon rise, because the Moon was an old friend of theirs and they had not spoken with him in a long time. They sat on the very edge of the earth and looked down into the darkness beneath it, and when the Moon sailed up out of it they greeted him with great cheer and asked him how he had fared since last they met.

The Moon greeted them, but very sadly, and when they asked him how he fared he said, "Oh, I am so unhappy! You do not know how lucky you are, to always have each other and to never have your love spurned!"

Well, the Blue Spirits were very curious when they heard this, and most of all when they heard that the Moon was in love. They asked who had been so cruel as to spurn his affection, and the Moon told them that he pined after the Sun. "How beautiful she is!" he sighed. "How brightly she shines! And how all those below adore her! But she will not listen to me whenever I try to tell her of my love, and she sails ever onwards and says that no one is good enough for her. She is so proud that she will not even stay in the same sky as me."

"Is that so?" said the older Blue Spirit, who remembered when the Sun, before she took to the sky, was but a spirit of fire and not so vain and haughty.

"This will not do," said the younger Blue Spirit, who remembered how the Sun, before she took to the sky, had sought always for approval and recognition.

They bade the Moon farewell as he set out on his journey, and they went together to the palace of the Sky King and the Star Queen and came before their thrones, and asked if they might teach the Sun a lesson so that she would not be so proud. This was because the Sun is their trusted servant, and even the Blue Spirits can not go against the Sky King or the Star Queen.

"You are right that the Sun has become proud," the Sky King and the Star Queen agreed. "And she needs to remember that there is such a thing as love, and that it can fade away as the ages pass to leave nothing but sorrow and shadow. So you may play a trick on her if it will make her less vain, but you must be sure that it will not hurt her or the earth or those who live there." And the Blue Spirits swore that they would not harm the Sun or the earth or those who lived there when they played their trick. And the younger of the Blue Spirits asked the Star Queen if they might borrow one hair from her beautiful head, to return to her later, and she in her generosity and kindness promised them not one but three with which to carry out their plan.

Then they travelled to the lands near the edge of the world which the Sun would pass over on the first part of her journey across the sky, and they took on the disguises of people of that land so she would not know them. The Sun had often watched and enjoyed their tricks from her lofty perch, so it would be very hard to deceive her, but they were confident that they could use her vanity to undo her.

At last the Sun rose up in her glory and her splendour, and all who lived in that land shielded their eyes as her light fell across them. Higher and higher she rose as she prepared to begin her voyage across the sky, but as she flew upwards she heard the Blue Spirits speaking together, for she was still near enough to the earth to hear their words.

"How wonderful the Sun is! How warm and comforting is her light! And how fierce is her golden gaze!" the older Blue Spirit said as they shielded their eyes like mortal Men to look up at her.

"Oh, yes! And how beautiful she is, so beautiful that we Men hardly dare look at her, for fear her loveliness will destroy our sight! I heard that even the Moon himself is pining away with love for her, but she will hear nothing of it!" the younger Blue Spirit added.

The Sun smiled when she heard this, for to her it was nothing but the truth; and what woman does not smile when she knows that a handsome man is a slave to her beauty?

"Really?" said the older Blue Spirit. "For I have heard that he has abandoned such a useless love, and he says that he has found a far better lady to admire, one who shines brighter even than the Sun and with more brilliance. She will travel across the sky tonight, and I plan to watch and see if such tales are true."

These words troubled the Sun, and as she went on her way she pondered them. It was not that she sought for the Moon's love, though it secretly flattered her, but she had believed that she was meant to be the greatest light in the sky above the earth. It was her duty, she thought, to shine the brightest and strongest so that darkness would forever be banished from the land. And then she began to think, "What if this new light captures the hearts of all that see it? They will think no longer of the glory and power that keeps the evil things away, but only of the next thing that has caught the Moon's wandering heart."

And as she travelled onwards she grew more and more worried, and as she grew more worried her pride grew all the greater and she became angry that the gods would send another light to the world to outdo her, though she told herself that she did not believe such a thing. And at last she decided that when the day was done she would stay at the edge of the world in the West and see what happened during the night for herself.

When the Sun left the sky she hid herself at the edge of the world and looked up at the sky as the Moon rose and the stars came out. And suddenly a great light shot across the darkness, white and blinding, and all those who lived upon the earth looked up in wonder and said what a sight it was, nothing like that had ever been seen before, the most beautiful sight of all time. And none of them knew that it was the three strands of the Star Queen's hair that the younger of the Blue Spirits had tied around a staff and carried quickly across the sky, and that it was the older of the Blue Spirits who exclaimed such things first so that they would follow.

I got no further than this, for Kala told me to go out of the room then and order for more clean linen. I saw no need for this, but I did as she said and walked outside and told the servants of the house what I wanted, and they hurried to obey. She made me do this twice more, and when the girl's husband came demanding news she sent me out to try to calm him and tell him that all was well. I spent all of that birthing on my heels by Edira's head or walking to and fro from the door, or talking to the women and trying to calm them, or staying by her side when we walked her about the room. When the baby began to come in great ripping pains all the women chanted a soothing song, and when we lifted her onto the bricks we whispered encouragement to her and called for the goddesses to bless her and keep her safe. Her mother sang lullabies and I sang children's songs and we tried to drown out her cries, telling her to breathe deep and push. We sang the birthing hymn in time with her breaths and pushes.

"You carry the goddess within you,

She cradles the child of your womb,

She gives of her strength and spirit,

She watches over you.

The lady's power runs through you,

Courage be with you, little mother!

The river of life has begun to flow,

She watches over you."

In the end her voice outdid ours as she roared and delivered her son, a squirming wet thing that fell out of her like a fish slipping through a man's hands. Kala caught him and held him up as he kicked and opened his mouth and wailed, and pronounced triumphantly, "Edira's son." It was the strangest sight I had seen yet, this wriggling bloody yellow thing, still connected to his mother by the fleshy cord that Kala soon cut off. He was ugly and beautiful, filthy but gorgeous and so alive it made me sigh. Kala put him to his mother's breast quickly and he knew what to do, suckling at once.

"Oh," said Edira, half in pain and half in wonder, sprawled on the floor and her arms about her bloody son as he took what he needed from her. "Oh, look at him. Oh, oh." She hardly noticed as the afterbirth fell out of her and Kala began to pack her womb with cloth to stop her from bleeding more, and her mother and aunts and mother by marriage all crowded about in delight. I went to the door and cried out to the husband that he had a son, and I heard him shouting the news joyfully to his father and to the servants, and the women outside began a triumphant song. And they both lived, and she called him Oaran, and he grew into a fine strong man. So there was happiness in that first birth.

There were others after that. There was a woman who bore twin girls, one living and one dead, strangled by the birth cord, and wept over one even as she suckled the other. There was a boy born who had the hair lip, and who was left out to die in the night despite Kala's protests and her anger. There were sons and daughters, and mothers and fathers, and the bereft. There were times when Kala would have to take a knife and open the way for the baby – and oh, how the women howled at _that_ - and there were times when she used forceps to pull the baby out from its mother, both of them shrieking all the way. There were times when the bleeding could not be stopped and the mother's life was carried away in the black river, and there were times when mother or child would sicken and die in the days after the birth, away from the gaze of the Sun.

Sometimes the men would weep when they heard of the death of their woman, or they would ask for their child calmly, or they would turn and walk away to mourn her in private. They would dance with joy or merely nod and go back to their work. Men were as different as the women they bedded. One man even swooned when he heard that his wife and babe were safe, and we women all clutched our sides in laughter as I made certain that he still breathed and then held the scents we used to waken mothers who had fainted under his nose.

"Take me to them!" he demanded, once he knew where he was again, but Kala simply said that he'd have to wait to see his wife until she was clean again. I brought out the boy to him instead, and he took him in his arms and crowed with delight. "He will be the best man in all Rhûn!" he declared. And he took him out to the male relatives, and they toasted him again and again with water of life, saying 'Long legs to the baby!' Kala merely sniffed and said, "That baby will be the tallest man in all Rhûn as well."

He lived too, that boy, lived to grow tall and strong. It is good, how many of them lived.

The first time I actually took part in a birth was easy, for Kala had purposefully chosen a woman who had bourn three children and was used to pregnancy by this time. Under her watchful eye I knelt and placed the bricks on the floor and smiled my sweet smile and asked her how she felt, and how far along in her pains she was. She nodded to Kala; clearly I knew how this should be done. I talked easily as Kala and I attended to her, and we told each other tales and sang songs to each other, her voice deep and breathy and throbbing. When the time came I was the one who caught her daughter. I watched as she came out from her mother all bloody and wet and cried a welcome to her as I helped her out the rest of the way. My song turned to horror as I nearly dropped her, but I saved her from falling to the floor and cleared the muck away from her nostrils, and I gloried in her cry and held her up in triumph. She was soft and sticky and warm against my hands, and she was my joy. I almost hated to give her over to her mother. I yearned to hold her and never let her go.

It ached sometimes, as the ages went on, as I saw so many children born and pass through my hands to those of their mother or the one who claimed them. I knew all about the complaints of pregnant women, the sicknesses and the cravings, the swelling and the stretching of flesh, but I would never experience them for myself. I would never achieve what my body prepared for every moon, and what it mourned as I bled. I would never suckle a son or daughter, feeding them with my life. My waist and hips and breasts would stay slim and untried, just like Ishara and Werru, Benti and Kala, but unlike them I was a seal that had never even been cracked.

It was hard. I had not thought that such hardness could be in the world. Once when I visited my home, early on, I went to where my mother sat carding wool and sat down beside her as I had not done for some time. When she asked me what the matter was I put my arms about her waist and my head against where I had come from, and I told her how it felt to see the girls that I had grown up beside – but not with, never with – grow fat and bear their children. I told her that I was jealous of those who were rewarded with a baby's soft skin and their warmth, and their smiles. I knew it was selfish and silly, but I could not help it. I wanted that which I knew I could not have, and what is more pathetic than that?

"So you want a daughter?" she asked me, as she ran her fingers through my braids, her voice half smiling and half serious I did not look at her face. "You want to carry and bear a child? I warn you, it is not as pleasant as you might think. And you need to have someone to father her, even if you don't keep him around." Her fingers stilled against my skin as she said that. We never spoke of my father, I hardly thought of him, but still he had been there, he had been needed for my conception. I did not want a man, I could not have a man, and without a man I could not have a child. And what sort of mother would I be? My own desires meant nothing now; they were weak and foolish.

"No," I said, and again, "no. I do not think that I would be a good mother."

"You would be a wonderful mother," Rookheeya said firmly. "You're my daughter! I hope that we have raised you well enough to raise another as well." But there was no real belief behind her words; she knew as well as I that I had little chance to attract a husband and even less desire to do so. And I shook my head.

"_No,"_ I said again, and I knew, as surely as I had known what shade of blue I wore in my dreaming as a child, that I spoke the truth. "I will never bear a child." And I never did.

* * *

Dinah remained a child for two more months after Kala took me, but at last she bled and I hurried with my mother and Kala to Rodren's house, and I sat and smiled at her and she frowned at me as her mother pulled her hair back into the braids of a woman. We danced for her, teaching her the great dance, where to place her feet and how to hold her hands. We moved together with our hands joined, and our mothers danced in joy that their daughters were grown. I watched as Kala laid Dinah down to rest, and how my cousin fell to the smoke of the poppy. She slept only a day and a night, and when she told Kala whatever she had dreamt Bilhah wrapped up her head in her head scarf for the first time. But then my aunt did something to her that had not happened to me; she fastened a veil across her daughter's face, covering her mouth and nose from ear to ear.

Dinah's eyes looked at me from her hidden face, and I stared back at her. I could no longer see her smile or laugh or do anything but furrow her brow, and when she spoke she had to stop the cloth from going into her mouth. I hugged her once and then Bilhah led her and Daron off to the temple and out of our family's life. I was not to see her again for months and months, unless she was one of the temple attendants that I noticed as I went less and less to that great building.

The days went on, and on, and I cut apart the dead and pulled the living from the living. Alamon was learning his father's business well, and was already looking for a wife. I walked along the streets in my apprentice robes and through the market place behind my teacher and delighted that the people nodded to her and to me as well. I rejoiced to think that I was acknowledged and beyond hardship and danger for now.

And then. Oh, then. Something happened that I could not have dreamed of, even with what I was learning. Bilhah had decided to finish with bearing after having Rodin whom she had carried when I became a woman, but one day she surprised Kala and I during a lesson by coming to seek my teacher's advice and we knew that she had conceived once more. Kala was concerned but not too so, for Bilhah by now had ten living children and had survived many pregnancies and births. We thought that all would be well, and Bilhah planned to treasure her last born child. She was certain that it would be a girl, a fourth niece for my mother, a fourth female cousin for me. She asked for me to be the one to catch her daughter when she was born, and I gladly promised that I would do so.

But when her time came and the birthing pains started, the mother of ten and more knew as well as Kala did when something inside her went wrong. She clutched my mother's hand in fear and her gasps were more terrible than screams. There was too much blood coming from her and the baby was tearing, ripping, and Kala lost much of her grace as she worked so hard to save mother and child. I handed her what she asked for, praying silently to whatever god would listen, to the goddesses to spare her, to not let my aunt's life go. I did my best to keep the women singing to try and calm her, but it became impossible when she began suddenly to shriek for her children, calling out their names, crying for the goddess to take pity on her. I began to cry and could not stop even when Kala ordered me to. Rookheeya held her up upon the bricks and tried to calm her, begging her with wet eyes to be strong and not to give in, but towards the end I do not think that Bilhah could even heard her.

She died so quickly; she did not even have time to whisper the name of her secret god to the world as she left it. As Rookheeya began to keen Kala took the time to mutter "Tarak receive her; Warrior, receive your chosen," before she took a knife, a _knife_, to my aunt's body. I could not bear to watch but I could not turn away, and Kala pried the babe out of her and passed it to me while she cut the cord. It was a boy, not the girl that Bilhah had so wanted. He kicked and began to cry where his mother had left off. I felt as if I would choke on my sorrow, that it would block my nose and mouth and throat and strangle me with pain as surely as the smell of blood clogged my senses.

Rookheeya took him to his father, her face wet with tears. I did not go with her; I did not want to see Rodren's face when he learned that the woman with whom he had shared his bed, his home, half his life, was lost to him in this world. I heard my cousins begin to cry and I tried to stop my ears as the women began to sing a high wailing song for my poor aunt. Kala did her best to tidy her up and sewed up her skin once more, but I could not forget the sight of her wide eyes and her flesh parting like a bag being opened. I walked out of that room and fell to my knees and was violently sick. My mother came back to me and rubbed my back and her tears fell into my sweaty hair. It seems sometimes that in some corner of my mind I shall always be on my knees knowing that my brave and beautiful warrior aunt is dead.

It was just as well that the child was a son rather than a daughter. There was more chance of forgiveness for a boy.

We buried her in red, a warrior's right, a tribute to a lifetime of courage. We buried her with her three children, two girls and a boy, that had died before they had truly lived; Rookheeya put their dried bodies into her dead arms in her grave. I do not know if Dinah and Daron had been permitted to leave their tasks but they arrived as the ceremony was ending and joined in dropping soil on their mother. I embraced both of them, but they were cold even in the high heat, and Dinah would not pull down her veil for me to kiss her. That was another sorrow; that they had not been there when she had died, they had not known of it until Rodren thought to send someone to the temple to tell them. They moved with grief in their every step. I saw them turning inward and away from the world and to each other. When I saw Dinah dance at Naani's festival a month later – it was her, she was veiled from head to toe but I know it was her – she still moved with such heaviness that I thought in my dreaming she might break to pieces.

Nothing was safe after that, after Bilhah's death. My cousins had lost but _one_ mother and that was terrible enough; I had four more to lose before my time was done, every one with a hold on my heart and a hook that would tear away a piece of it when they were gone. When my bond-aunt Werru and my bond-aunt Ishara and my bond-aunt Benti and my mother Rookheeya were dead, what would be left of me? How can I answer that? I did not know. In the nights after that terrible time I would dream of my friend, my Pallando – or was it another who was like and unlike him? – who cried for one who had passed beyond this land and to another. They wailed for their companion to come back, and if it had been in my power I would have granted their wish, I would have reunited them and nothing in this world would have kept them apart again.

Dreams! I woke in the mornings with sleep in my eyes and tears dried on my face, knowing that I was one day closer to that dark time when someone else would leave me.

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The techniques of birth used in this chapter are based on methods used in Ancient Egypt, where a woman would give birth squatting on a pair of 'birth bricks'. This had been mostly replaced in the developed world by the 'lithotomy position' – the woman on her back in a bed with her feet in stirrups to support her – because it provides a better view for the doctors of what exactly is going on 'down there'; but this position is being used less because it impedes blood flow to the infant, possibly increases the chance of blood clots and haemorrhage, and generally makes it more painful for the mother. And this is childbirth

**we're talking about here; it's painful by default unless you get painkillers injected at the base of your spine.**

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Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress!


	8. Even in paradise

**Disclaimer: I do not own LOTR, or The Red Tent. See the author's notes at the end for what exactly my crazy little mind **_**did **_**come up with.**

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"In the city where I grew to womanhood," Kala told me once, in the early days of my apprenticeship and about a day after I had moved the snake herb to another pot, "they believed that the fair ones, the long-lifes, have no souls."

"Why would they think that?" I had asked her, for the tales I had heard of the beautiful creatures that looked only a little like Men claimed that if a long-life died the gods gave their unhoused spirit a new body, a gift that Men would never receive. "The blessed race is immortal, unless wounded to the point of death, or filled with sorrow beyond repair, and if they die then they are reborn in flesh again to replace that which they have lost. _Something_ must be there to depart from the old body and inhabit the new one, if the stories are true, otherwise that would not be the same person. That would just be another person born in place of them."

"But whatever that thing is, is it a soul? Does it truly last?" Kala loved to debate about such things and to encourage me to do so as well. She said that it stretched the mind and broke down barriers of ignorance. "There are stories too that say that when the world ends, as surely it will someday, then the fair ones will cease to exist with it while those who pass beyond will live forever. A soul is immortal; how can the long-lifes have souls, therefore, if they are doomed to end at last?"

She expected me to argue back, and so I did. I reminded her of how the fair ones, while not born to die, could die nonetheless. I told her how the gods were immortal, but one former god – the creature whose name we did not even mention, the lost and evil demon – had been destroyed by his kindred for his wicked acts. Just because something could die did not mean that it did not have a spirit or soul. We soon fell into an argument over what defined immortality, and we talked no more of souls at that time.

We did talk about the fair ones again, though. This time I was in my fourteenth year and Kala had taken me to the market and bought me a new tunic, for my body had chafed by then in my old ones and sometimes it had hurt to breathe and oh, how it had hurt when I had run! I had gone to show myself off to my mother and my aunts and had returned to her full of delight at their words of praise, and she had smiled and said that I would be turning some heads now. I had been even more delighted, for what young woman is not pleased when she hears that she is attractive? It made Kala nostalgic, and she began telling me about when she had been young and she had caught the eye of more than one man. And in the midst of that, she told me that when she had managed to be allowed into the rich land on the north-west of the Sea, she had met two very special, very clever and _very_ handsome men, and one of them was a fair one…

My words when I had heard this nearly made her choke with laughter on the barely water she was drinking. "Which one did you bed, then?"

"Neither, actually" she managed, when she had stopped coughing. "The man was only a boy, really, and betrothed too; and I had no right to insult a bride before her marriage. And as for the fair one, the males never deign to notice us mortal women in that way. Only _their_ women seem to find Men desirable. But my long-life was quite a good friend. We were all friends; the boy in his eighteenth year, the _isha_ in the prime of her life and the fair one with hundreds of years behind him."

The boy had been called Turambar, and the long-life had been called Amdír. Amdír had lived on that coast for more than four hundred lives of men, and he had known Turambar from his birth, and had watched with disapproval as the youth had followed the woman from the East around like a dog following its master. She had smiled as the older creature stared coolly at her, and she had humoured the pale skinned boy, marvelling that he could be so desirous of her. She did not lead him on but still he chased after her, and as he chased her she grew ever more amused, teasing him though never seeking to hurt him and teasing his fuming guardian as well. Somewhere in the teasing and the following and the fuming there was made a friendship between the three, born from jokes and reprimanding and woeful flirting on Turambar's part. They would walk through the vineyards that Turambar's family owned and tended, or they would sit by the many fountains and listen to the sound of running water, or they would sit in the shade and Amdír would tell the two mortals stories of ages past, when the world was greener. He was one of the best story-tellers she had ever heard, better even than the professional ones back in her home city. It was one of the happiest times of her life, or so Kala said.

But in the end she had left that rich green land, for she knew that she could not make her home there. She valued Turambar's friendship, but she did not love him and his love for her had made his family hostile, and the tint of her skin would always set her apart in a land where the darkest men were the colour of sand. The men of the land of vines tolerated the people of the Sea, but she was of Eastern stock and the East would never be fully welcome there. So she left before she might be driven out, saying farewell only to Amdír and promising that she would stay in contact in some way, and she departed from that land of grapes and wine and Men and fair ones that lived together, where no soldier of the One of the South ever came.

"That land sounds like something out of a folktale," I had sighed, when her story was finished. "How could you bear to leave it?"

"Were you not listening?" she retorted. "I had brought the son of one of the most important families there to licking my sandals if I had asked him, even though I didn't want him to. White skins don't take kindly to that, especially if the son is already betrothed. And I am an _'Easterling'_, after all." I did not know that word, and I told her so, and she explained with a hard smile. "Those people who have grown up around the Sea are excused, since they are raised on worship of the gods and goddesses. But any from further South and East are all gathered together and given that name; _Easterling. _To most white skins and fair ones, the people caught under that name are all alike, all servants of the One of the South, with no distinction between those of culture and civilisation from those who would offer their own daughters to be the broodmares of shadowed ones!"

She stopped speaking and breathed heavily through her nose, before beginning to speak again. "That place _is_ a bit like a folktale, true, but it is not perfect. Nothing is truly perfect in this tainted world, not any longer, nothing is truly safe. Believe that if you believe nothing else."

We did not talk of the land of vines again, the land that its inhabitants called _Dorwinion, _but Kala did tell me some of the stories that Amdír had told her: of talking eagles and a hound who was wiser and braver than many men, and trees that walked and herded smaller trees as if they were sheep or goats. There was one story she told very well, that of a great white city full of long-lifes with many sparkling fountains, hidden away in deep hills, and the fair princess of that city who fell in love with a mortal man and who did _not _lose him despite war and strife. My favourite part of that tale was the courtship of the fleeting man and the immortal woman, and I would listen happily to Kala talking of feet plated with silver and embraces between columns and pillared walks, for while I had no desire for a man I could appreciate when another female snared one for herself. She had a good memory and could even imitate the accent of Amdír to make the stories sound as she had heard them; she would save the stories for when I had done well at something, or when she thought that I needed to be comforted.

And so we went on, ever on.

And then Bilhah died. And after that life was strange, and then it grew terrible. Never had I worried for my mother and aunts as I did then. Sometimes if I thought of when it would be the time for Ishara or Benti or Werru to die I grew distracted and could not concentrate on what I was doing; and if I thought of Rookheeya it was enough to make the tears come to my eyes as I lost my breath. My head began to ache and my eyes swelled and my nose often ran. Even after we had put away our plain cloth robes and had finished our mourning my appearance was enough for my mother to continuously ask after my health, her face drawn with her own sorrow.

"What is it? What is the matter with you?" she would ask again and again, and I would turn my head away to hide my tears and lie that I still missed Bilhah, when in truth I thought only of when she would die and leave me in her turn.

I told no one. I thought that since I was chosen by Laban I should manage my sorrow at death. I believed that I was foolish if I could hear of the ends of thousands of men in laments composed to wrench the hearts of whoever heard them, but could not stomach the inevitable when it came. I tried so hard to keep the tears back. I lay awake at night and thought of myself as a rock, a pillar, cold and untouchable, a queen made out of the cold that lurked in the sky at night, but still I would wake with dampness on my face in the morning.

Ishara came to visit us one day, unannounced, and she took me out walking with Kala's permission. She limped up to the grazing fields with me at her side, leaning on her staff more and more now, and we sat on one of the great rocks that dotted the land and looked down at the village and the temple, and the sea. When she was comfortable my bond-aunt said, "This is not just about Bilhah any more, is it?" I could never lie to Ishara. I shook my head and curled about myself, hoping that she could not see the water in my eyes. And though she asked me to tell her my troubles, I could not answer for fear my voice would crack.

"Then do you wish me to guess at what torments you and makes you weep every day? It will not be a pleasant task, but someone must do it." Ishara rapped her staff against the rock, beating out a child's tune, as she looked away from me and at the ever blue sky. "You're worrying Rookheeya greatly, you know. She can bear her own sorrow quite well, but she could never bear yours from the day you came crying into this world. She's so afraid she thinks that you might actually take your own life." That startled me out of my silence. How could my own mother think that I would wish to hurt her so? Did she not know me at all?

"Why would she think that I would do that?"

My aunt shrugged as she hit the stone beneath us with the staff again. "Fear makes her irrational and takes away her good sense. You certainly wouldn't be the first girl that any of us have known to open her veins or hang herself." And I knew that she talked of the pit deep in the forest, and that it was not just the crushing darkness that had taken their comrades from them, one by one. "You don't look as if you've come to _that_ yet, mind you. But still, you should tell me. Come on, now."

It took far more than those words, but at last she coaxed it from me, all of it. I have forgotten many things, but I have never forgotten what my bond-aunt Ishara told me then, as we sat on the rock and she put her un-withered arm around me and we looked out upon our home.

"All humans die, Adahni. That is how the gods and goddesses made us, or the Almighty One, or whoever it was that fashioned the Race of Men. That cannot be changed or altered. And sometimes, though I pray that _you_ never come to such a pass, sometimes life can come to the point that death is better. Now, we four, I and your mother and Werru and Benti, we all know that, hopefully not too near in the future, we will die. We have never denied it. We have all come close to death more than once in our lives. We are no strangers to such a prospect, and I believe we have spent the time that we have had well enough that we will not regret our lives when the time comes for them to end."

"But I do not _want_ any of you to die." Those were my words, heavy and forced from a sore throat.

"Has anyone ever wanted such a thing for someone they love? Unless, as I said, death is better? But whether you want it or not, Adahni, my dear, it will happen. And when it does, for each of us in turn, I hope that you will weep because you loved us and because we loved you, and because we have left you and because we are gone from this world and will not return. Sometimes our absence will tear at you, and you will long to hear our words or simply to feel our presence and know that you are loved by us, and it is not a sin if you let it hurt. And then, in time, you will smile again, because there is more in the world than just we four for you, and there is more for you to do with your life than weep it away in memory of those who have left it."

I loved her for that, for not blandly comforting me by saying that we would meet again when I passed beyond the circles of the world myself. I loved her for letting me cry until there seemed to be no salt water left in me. I love her for allowing me my grief.

* * *

But now, let me tell you something different from anything I have said so far.

When Alamon went with the merchant train to the north-west shore of the Sea in my sixteenth year, I wished to go with him. I was of a mind to see the world before I settled down into my set place, and Kala agreed with me and thought that she could spare me for some months. But Rookheeya did not want me to go, and she refused again and again when Kala asked her and Ishara argued with her and I pleaded with her. Kala told her that she should not worry, that the soldiers of the One of the South, if that dread personage was even still alive, never ventured along the southern and western shores of the Sea, but my mother said no. Alamon promised her that he would protect me with his own life; still my mother clung to me as if I would be dragged off to fill the fate that she had escaped. I told her of my desire to see the lands to the north, I reminded her of my sacred office and how no one would dare to touch me, but in her fear she would not listen to my arguments, and I would not go without her blessing.

But I was determined to leave and so we clashed over it for several nights, until at long last I won out and she said that she would wait for me to return, and held my face in her hands as she made me promise that I would not stay too long abroad. She summoned Alamon to her and she ordered him and Ishara threatened him until he would have carried me on his back all the way there and back again just so that they would stop their talking. And on the morn that we departed she gave me a knife, a sharp thing with a fine curved blade and a handle of bone, and a sheath for it to hang at my side. I told her that I did not think I would need it, but I thanked her for the weapon and I assured her that I knew where to sink it where it would do the most damage in a man's body. She took my face in her hands again and kissed me on the forehead and the cheeks and everywhere, and once more I was in her arms. I was as tall as her, now.

"You must make certain that you spend your time away from here well, do you hear me? After all that you've done to get away, you must not regret it, or I will not be pleased with you at all. So see and do many things, and come back here with new tales to tell us all."

"I will, mother," I told her, and I smiled my brightest and best smile for her and she ran her finger down my forehead and my long nose, and told me that the gods and goddesses looked favourably on me and would not abandon me in my travels. Never had she done that for me, and yet it seemed familiar from her tales of that man in blue in the darkness who gave life to me and strength to her. I told her that I could not believe that I would be in danger, and that I would not believe that I could be in danger. She smiled at how I echoed her, and so we parted after a long embrace, and more tears not quite shed, and embraces from my aunts and from Kala who had come to see me off.

Alamon lifted me up into the small cart that would take the wares he was entrusted with to the port where they would be transferred to the boat; we would sail on that to reach the port we were allowed to dock at, and then there would be another cart to ride in from there. I settled myself among jars of olive oil and fruit preserves and bundles of new rope made from goat hair, and wool, some of it from our family's own sheep, and cotton from further up our side of the coast. I nestled among a cargo of things that, if not quite riches, were certainly desired by many in my village and many others. And we went away, we two cousins, away from our home in the hills and to the port. I waved to the five women who saw me off, but Alamon did not do so, too focused on the mule ahead of us and on keeping up with the other merchants, his first time making this journey alone with only the daughter of an _isha_ beside him.

The goods were loaded on to the boats, ten in all, and we departed at midday. I had never been on a boat before for I had had no reason to sail upon the sea, and I spent much time by the side ready to void up whatever was in me, even if it never quite came to that. For the rest of our time I would stay by Alamon as he sat by the packed goods he was responsible for, and we would talk. I had hardly spoken to him for three years by this time and we had both changed. Such different things were important to us now that we were no longer children; the man who had been a boy who ruled over his siblings and his cousin with such an arrogant joy had had all of that joy leeched from him. There were lines about his eyes and his lips were thin and pressed together more than they should have been, and anyone could tell that he was thinking what to say before he said it. I did not know whether he still thought on his mother, or whether he thought on her at all, but I sat by his side and talked to him and listened to him answer while his thoughts were ever elsewhere. I thought to myself that sometimes it was easier to be a woman than a man, for it is no surprise when women are imperfect and only to be expected. We were allowed to cry, to mourn, and we were allowed to make mistakes to a point, but weakness in a man is seen as pitiful. I wondered how Alamon had learned such a lesson.

He still had his arrogance, though, and he still took charge when it came to me. If any man so much as looked in my direction he would look right back at them until they walked onwards, and whenever I slept, or tried to sleep, he would always sit by my blanket with a frown on his face for anyone who dared to come near. When I tried to tell him that no one would dare touch me, as I had told my mother, he waved away my apprenticeship with the words, "There are some for whom nothing is sacred, cousin." And what could I say to that?

(Four) days we spent upon that boat, and at last we came to a small inlet where we could tie up and disembark. As we came nearer and nearer to the coast I saw three little crafts come racing across the water, faster than our boats could ever have managed, and made of palest wood. I leaned upon my arms on the side and watched them approach, and remarked to Alamon what fine sailors the men in the boats must be. He squinted at them, and then he said that they should be, for they had more time to perfect their skills than any man ever would.

That was the first time that I saw long-lifes, as they sailed alongside our boat and called out to know who was aboard. Two males; and they lived up to the names that people gave them for they were the most beautiful creatures that I had ever seen. One had brown hair, but of a deeper and richer brown than the dullness of the East, and the other seemed to have a wealth of golden threads upon his head. I could not quite make out the colour of their eyes at that time, but later I learned that they were blue. Think of it; blue eyes! I had only ever looked into eyes that were brown or near black or the tawny yellow of my mother; think of having eyes the same colour as the lucky blue sky, the realm of Salim and Adah! Some stories said that the Blue Spirits had eyes the same colour of their robes, and now here were two beings with eyes that matched the high heavens!

And the hair fell against skin the colour of cream mixed with honey, and the eyes were set in faces that were strange and even unsettling in their beauty. The one who was nearest to the side of our boat, the one with brown hair, looked in my direction by chance as he was told who was on the vessel; to me he looked as if he had no more than twenty years behind him, but he also looked as if he had been only twenty for a very long time indeed. He spoke in Westron, and from what little I understood and Alamon translated for me, he said that we were to moor at the dock and prepare for the next part of our journey.

What confused me was that only three of the boats did so; the other seven sailed onwards along the coast without stopping, with two of the fair ones' crafts skimming beside them. I waited until all of Alamon's goods had been loaded into another cart of a design that I had never seen before - with a raised cloth cover - and I was seated beside him as we set off once more on the last part of our journey, directed by the brown haired one and the golden head, before I asked.

The answer? That merchants from the eastern shore were not allowed to simply sail into the great port of Dorwinion;they had to prove their trustworthiness before they could be allowed such easy access. Three times they had to make the journey by land as well as by water, and show good conduct in the land of the vines, before they could dock in the heart of that green country and be welcomed by something more than hearty suspicion at the best and spears and arrows at the worst. Already Kala's warning was being proved; this place was no folktale.

The brown haired one and the golden head followed us, though they rarely showed themselves. Sometimes when I was seated in the back of the cart and was watching the land spread out behind us, flatter and greener than any land I had seen before, I might see a shape on horseback, seated too well for even my untrained eyes to be any man. Sometimes we would see them, and sometimes we would simply know that they were watching us and that it would take very little time for them to be at our side, bow ready if something or someone was amiss. It was not pleasant, and nor was the great open plain that surrounded us as we travelled onwards. I missed the hills that had always broken up my view of the world about me, for there was only a smudge of any hills to the west. I had thought that the blue sky unimpeded would be a marvellous sight, but now that it was before me it was nearly too much. I felt so small - as if the openness of the air was crushing down upon me. I would lie curled on my side amid the goods and barely see the horizon over the top of the cart, feeling the heat of the sun strained by the cloth awning over my head. Alamon feared that I was sickening from something, but I waved him away, telling him that I was merely learning how big the world truly was at last.

When we stopped to let the horses rest from their labour I would lay upon the grass and feel it and smell it, and it struck me how different it felt and smelled from the thin grass on the other side of the sea. And knew then how far I was from home when things that should have been so familiar did not even smell the same.

And the nights were so cold! All the carts would stop and the men would make a fire for us to sit about and talk, though we talked little. Besides me, there was only one other woman in our party, a newly married wife who was just fourteen and who was too timid to do anything but huddle by her husband's side. I stayed by Alamon as we shared blankets for warmth. One of the long-lifes came into the light of the fire once, to ask us coolly how we fared, and refused to share our hearth when we offered it. One of the men muttered, when he was certain that our visitor could no longer hear him, that the fair ones could not even feel the cold, or if they did then they did not recognise it. And then we would settle down to sleep in the carts, after choosing one to keep watch, and I would lie under blankets at Alamon's back as he slumbered and look up at the stars above us and try to think of all the tales I knew of them, before the warmth of my cousin's body pulled me down into sleep.

After four days – or it might have been five – there was a dark line in the distance, and then it grew as we came closer to it, and at last we saw that it was a great wall, made from wood, that stretched out on either side of us and did not stop even when my sight failed. It looked fairly old, and it looked solid, and it looked as if it would not hold off attacking enemies forever, but it would keep them occupied for some time.

And when the fair ones, who were magically with us once more, called out, the gates were opened and out came armed men with skin nearly as pale as their long-life allies, dressed in such strange garments. And they were so _tall!_ If I had stepped from the cart and stood next to one he would have been two heads taller than me, probably more. If _Alamon, _who was one of the tallest men in the village, had stood next to one of those men, they would still have been taller than him. Once they had heard the fair ones' accounts of our behaviour – or so it seemed; they spoke in a beautiful language that I had never heard before – and then the men turned to ask us questions in Westron.

They seemed to accept most of us, but of course – of course! - they were curious about me. They questioned me and I had to explain to them, through Alamon of course, that I was the daughter of an _isha _and therefore could choose not to wear a veil; and then of course I had to explain what an _isha _was, since no one from our land had ever thought or had to had the need to describe such an extraordinary woman. It was difficult to try to capture and hold down for examination something so…so intrinsic, so simple and yet so important to those I had been surrounded by for all of my life. I sought for the right words, failed to find them, and I told them that women scarred on their flesh or in their hearts or minds by warfare had the right to cast away their old roles and take up new lives of independence, and that my mother had been one of them. I do not know if the pale men quite believed it, but the fair ones seemed happy with my words and so they agreed that I should pass by as well. And so they opened the gates wider and wider, and at last we were permitted into Dorwinion.

And oh, the things that we saw there.

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Copious author's notes!

'**Wine of the Dorwinion' is mentioned in The Hobbit as an alcoholic beverage** **that can make even Elves drunk, and the land itself lies on the north west shores of the Sea of Rhûn. I chose to have it populated by both Men and a few Elves for the simple reason that there is no solid evidence on which species was living there at this point.** **The Men are there because most of the Elves left long before; some Elves are there because they're not longing for the sea just yet, or because they've come from the West to organize having wine shipped to Thranduil's court. I've also chosen to have the wall closing off the land from anything further south and letting only certain people through – which will be gone into further in the next chapter, I assure you! - because I seriously doubt that the Elves of Mirkwood would have bought wine from any place that was in league with Sauron, or any perceived evil. Prudence, mixed with just a tad of xenophobia and species-ism. **

**These **_**are**_** the Elves we're talking about, after all.**

**The whole 'Elves have no souls' belief of the Easterlings is basically an idea I adapted from the general mythology of fae creatures in this**** world: being that they are tied to their homeland and when they die or are killed their consciousnesses simply cease to exist, as opposed to human souls that go to heaven, purgatory or 'the other place'. (Sort of like the original version of 'The Little Seamaid'****.) Of course most people who live around the Sea of Rhûn know from the stories - or even from being told - that the Elves **_**do**_** have souls and that they do not 'wink out' but get new bodies; but they also believe that humans go on to something more than just reincarnation and are granted a blessed relief. The people around the sea are gradually accepting 'The Gift of Men', although for various reasons it's taken a while – say about four thousand years. Water dripping on a stone, people, water dripping on a stone. **

**Anyone who has been wondering about **_**isha **_**(perhaps not many, since it's my own invention; but hey, who knows?) will have some questions answered here. Describing what exactly being an **_**isha **_**consists of is rather complicated. In some ways it's rather like being a female eunuch, only without any operations needed (unless the woman is **_**very**_** unlucky); at other times it's like being a female version of an Asian 'Hijira'. A woman who declares herself **_**isha, **_**literally 'reborn',****divorces herself from her previous life and any subservient role she might have had, and also abandons some female qualities that are standard for Rhûn such as having children and taking care of the home. She provides for herself and whoever she may choose to make her new life with (usually other **_**isha **_**women), and usually does not conform to the fashions of the ordinary women around her. It's often a tough life and there are relatively few women who choose it, but those who do can turn out quite well and become important, if not altogether accepted, members of their community.**

**I've got to find a way to work all this in somewhere, because I am just **_**that**_** much of a nerd about my own musings.**

**And yes, people from Rhûn **_**are**_** shorter than people on the west side of the Sea, and definitely shorter than the Elves. That's all Tolkein, that is.**

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Reviews for the half Irish seamstress!


	9. City of the Fair

**Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.**

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The people of _Dorwinion_ were so loud! They talked constantly, true, as all of the race of Men seem to do, but they also spoke with such voices that anyone passing by them could hear their conversations. The men and women of our tribe talked to each other in low tones when outside our houses; but it seemed that _they_ simply didn't _care _if any heard them or if any would wish to. The maidens were the worst, walking along in little groups with their skirts flaring out about them, whispering so loudly that there was no point to it; their laughter was horrible. When I first heard them cackling away about some meaningless thing I though that they had hurt themselves, they sounded as if they were screaming. But no, they were laughing about some ribbon that one of them had found in a place she had not expected it to be.

They were all so tall as well; it was as if we had stepped into a land of giants. There were very few there, save for the children, that I did not have to tilt my head up to speak to. They looked down on me without meaning to, and there was some place in not my heart but my stomach that hated them for it. Whenever we went among them we would dart about like fretting horses, skirting around those who strode past us as if they might trample us under their booted feet. Their cloaks would smack us on our legs or even our chests when they blew in the wind, and once when I was standing behind a maiden a gust blew her straw-like hair out and into my face and I had to fight not to splutter and claw it away from me.

Their hair, though, their hair was very fine, and it often caught the eye as it fell about them if they were men or girls unmarried. It was long and straight or, if it was curling, it fell only loosely in waves like the surface of the sea, and it was many different colours. We could walk through the streets and see so many shades of brown it was as if we were in a forest, and once or twice there would be one with hair not quite the colour of blood. On the other side of the sea people might say it was a sign that they had been conceived during the time when their mother's moon blood had flowed and that their tempers flared as hot as fire, if you believed such stories. There was also the legend that those born with red hair were gifted with the Sight, but none of these red headed people seemed to possess the gift of prophecy and they stamped along like any of their fellows with none of the mystique of the few seers that I had ever seen.

I did not see many of them on our first day in the city for Alamon told me to stay in the wagon while we were being taken to the place set aside for foreign traders; and once we reached the place there was such a crowd of our own people debating which stalls and storing places the men should have that it was evening before Alamon and I could rest, and it was too late then to go and look at the city even if Alamon would have let me. I had to wait until the morning of the next day to see more of the white faced men and have my first sight of their pale women and children with dots all over their skin, cast there by the Sun.

They were curious about us, but not as curious as we were of them; people like us were a common sight in the area that was assigned to foreigners. Still, many of them asked questions in their loud voices; some of them had met Alamon the year before when he had come with his father and remembered him and they were polite, asking us how old we were and what our families were like. Some were not so courteous. Once in the first days of our stay, when I was fetching some spices from our stores, I saw a pale man talking to Alamon and my cousin returned him a quiet answer in Westron but I could see that he was angry. When the man was gone I asked him what had happened, and he told me that the customer had been asking if I was his slave girl, since I dressed so differently from all the other women. He'd told him to tell anyone else who'd thought of asking such a question that I was his younger sister. I was somewhere between outraged and amused myself, but I took care to say nothing and I kept my knife fairly visible at my waist for the next few days. I wondered what they thought of us, of our people, if they believed every woman was property and that every man was willing to sell anything.

They would come to our market place every day. There were the men with silver in their beards who would debate with the older merchants about their stocks of wool and cotton, and there were the shop owners who would bargain for spices and give us herbs in return. There were nomads come in from the brown lands with the skin of our people and the hair of pale skins who wanted leatherwork and pretty saddles for their fine horses, or fur to trim the tunics that they wore. There were fisherman who would barter for rope, and the women would come in number for items like oil and dried fruits and other things for cooking. Our stall and our stock were visited by younger people, particularly young unattached women who were drawn to my tall, strong cousin, or who were reassured by the sight of a woman of their age with a face they could see. They would point to things that they wanted and mime until they learned that Alamon could speak quite good Westron, and then they would put on their dumb show for me instead. A few of them remembered him from his first trip and would tease him about certain things he had supposedly done that made him glance at me in panic, but I would just smile and go on fetching things or rolling out the wool bracelets that those girls so liked. They were speaking so quickly most of the time I could understand very little of what they said in any case.

The new ones among us stayed in the space allotted to us for some time. We did not quite dare venture out into the sea of tall buildings around us, forming a maze of streets that we had never encountered before in our home. These buildings of stone - as pale as their makers - had two or sometimes even three stories. There was always a secret fear that one of them would crumble and fall over, crushing you beneath it. In quiet times I would watch the upper levels of the houses that surrounded our temporary world and wonder what went on behind those windows; what could people possibly do on a second floor that they couldn't do on one where your feet were at least on the ground? We hesitated to make our way into that mass of towers fearing we would get lost or ambushed in some way since there were so many places to hide or disappear. We would sit by the fires at night and sing chants and try to pretend that these were not sung to keep the shadows and whatever might live in the maze away. Still, my curiosity was already making me want to take a look at what lay beyond our own well trodden borders by the time the new bride, Ennia, came to me and asked me if it was possible that she was expecting, a suspicion I soon confirmed.

"We will have to get you good things to eat," I told her, "good food early on means a strong, healthy child!" We decided that we would have to go out into Dorwinion itself to buy things that I knew were important to an early pregnancy; our group of merchants and traders had been living on things like lentils and dried meat and she needed fresh greens, salad and fruit to help the baby on its way. Telling her husband of the reason behind our need to leave the stalls was enough for him to send us on our way with a blessing, but we needed someone to come with us, to speak for us. One of the merchants pressed his son Attar on us, and we three set out.

If there had been only two of us instead of three that day I am certain we would have soon turned back, overwhelmed by what we saw. I felt very sorry indeed for poor Attar; Ennia and I could walk close together and that gave us some comfort, but he had to march along and look as if nothing was wrong even when passers by stopped to look after us. Worse, he had to translate for us when we at last reached a shop that looked as if it had what we needed. He had never learned the Westron for such words as pregnancy or baby, and we had to mime the reasons for wanting the fruit and vegetables that we pointed to while the keeper of the shop stared at us as if we were mad. We had gathered quite a crowd, and by the time we came away with our purchases Attar looked as if he wished for Hee-un to make the sea rise and swallow the whole city with all of us in it.

Then he had to stamp after us as we grew more curious and slowly climbed one of the hills that the city was built on, and stand by as we stared at the view, at the streets and the squares and the roofs, the flow of the river that cut the city in half, the gleam of the sun upon the fountains and the green of the vineyards to the north and west. We shared out some of the apples we had bought and ate them while pointing to the south and the plains over which we had come, making out the dark line of the great wooden wall that separated Dorwinion from what would become the 'brown lands', where the nomads with white gold hair came riding in from. We watched the merchant trail that led to the West, carrying the barrels of wine that made the region so famous. And our eyes kept returning to the city in the midst of this green, old and slightly faded but still elegant and majestic. Ennia even said that she half wished her child had been conceived there, in such a place of beauty. But at last Attar was annoyed enough that he ordered us back to our market place and we went with perfect obedience, eating the last of our apples loud enough to annoy him even further.

Poor Attar would be annoyed even more, for he soon became the supposed guardian of a larger group than two; once we had told the other women of our trip and what we had seen some of them wanted to come with us if we went out again. With their husbands' blessing five other women joined us, and we had some very merry times as we walked about the streets with our surly shadow in our wake. We visited the docks where fishing boats and merchant ships from other ports of the east came in and unloaded cargos of fish and cotton and kakaw and sun fruits and many other good things. We went back up the hill and spent a while looking at the lay of the land, and looking to the West as well and wondering what lay in that direction, where none of us would ever go – and we learned to speak of it quite freely, even in my presence. We looked at the rich vineyards and the work that went on in them and smelled the scent of crushed grapes upon the air.

We found little treasures in little streets, tiny images of women set in small alcoves that the people bowed to without even knowing why, but which we knew enough to recognise as the Queen of Heaven, the Earth Mother, the Eternal Renewal, the Dancer and other familiar figures from our beliefs. We found the fountains that Kala told me of and sat by them and dabbed clear water on our wrists and temples to cool ourselves, more out of custom than from any real need to recover, and we saw symbols beneath the water, on the stone itself, that could only mean Hee-un. I wondered who had put all these things there and if these people really believed as we did, that they had not forgotten the gods who had made them.

We went to stalls run by pale women and one or two of the older ladies would strike up conversations with faces that they remembered through many years of coming to this city. It was easier to find green things for Ennia with the friendship of the ladies, and sometimes their daughters would be introduced to us so that another generation could learn to make ties with the people from the other side of the sea. Ennia and I never quite knew what to say to these girls who seemed almost like over grown children, never mind that we could share very few words. From what I could tell they were almost always talking of young men and making themselves pretty for them and where they would meet and what they would do there and who would choose who for a spouse as time went on, which was all very strange to us. Our women did not flirt as these did, we did not entice men to us with ribbons and scents, we would not giggle and whisper whenever a young man passed us, or at least not where they could see us. Our women knew that they would marry where their parents willed even if those who would be wives had more choice in the matter, and that with any luck they could fall in love after they were married, or if they did not like their husband they did not have to share his bed too often. All the silliness that these chattering maidens indulged in seemed pointless to us, even if we never said so. Even a concubine might not engage in such behaviour as they did.

They asked us questions about ourselves, with their mothers and our older companions as translators. They were surprised that Ennia was already married and pregnant, perhaps because they wed later than we did, and they wanted to know why I did not cover my face. I was surprised the news had not spread, considering the fuss the guards at the wall had made over it. They giggled at my robes at first; I did not learn why until later when Alamon told me that whores in this part of the world often dressed in red and yellow, and I felt more hate in my stomach than ever when I thought of the sign of my holy office being seen as a invitation for a night between my legs.

When they learned that I was all but a midwife they stopped giggling and started asking me about things like love potions and fertility charms that made me want to burst out with giggles myself; anyone who tried to go to Kala for such a thing as a love potion would be laughed out of her house, though she did know remedies to restore potency in men and women. One of them even asked me if I could read the future.

"No," I told her. "I can do many things, but I cannot do that. I do not have the Sight."

She frowned while one of my friends translated that last part, for I had slipped into our language for it. "You are sure? How do you know that you do not?"

"I know," I assured her, and all of us who had come from beyond the sea nodded. "If a person is touched by Loren then everyone will know it, and most of all they will know it. I do not have the Sight. You are more likely to have the Sight than me." And this was true, for her hair was red like fire itself and she really was the most otherworldly being I had ever seen, save for the fair ones.

We went to what was once their part of the city, though many of them had left and now lived on the outskirts, as if reluctant to be penned on all sides by Men however well they might or might not get on with them. We looked at the lovely buildings now filled so very often with Men – Men who somehow, impossibly, shared some of the beauty of the long lifes, dark haired and grey eyed, but still Men – fashioned so delicately they seemed to be made out of spun glass or even sugar, and they touched my heart in some sad defeated way. They looked so _fragile_, as if one good hot gaze from the Sun would make them melt away, the ones who had built them and once lived in them fading as well. I ran my hands over walls and door frames that had been carved perhaps a thousand years before and had by some magic never weathered, but looked as if they might start crumbling any day, beautiful as they were. We were even allowed into one house to look around and every room yielded a new sight to make us lose our breath again: paintings on the walls so very lifelike, carved wooden ceilings, such glass work in the windows as we could hardly ever dream of even with all the skill of our glass makers. And this in a relatively ordinary house, built more lifetimes of Men ago than I could guess or fathom, perhaps built when the Blue Spirits had come to the land, perhaps even soon after the gods themselves had made the world! It was like breathing in a very myth that was as tenuous as a moth's silk, all too easily torn away.

The only thing of theirs that was solid was that wall that we had passed through. It had been built for strength and it had lasted for centuries, and there were stories that it was enchanted and would not suffer any to pass it uninvited; the magic of the long-lifes went so far as to keep out all that they did not desire.

We watched them as they glided through the city, the divine ones, fairest beings that ever I saw. It was like a dream to see them working side by side and speaking to ordinary men and women and the mortals talking back to the immortals, as if it were the most common place thing in the word to be in conversation with one who was walking the earth before your distant ancestors were born and did not even look it, save in their eyes. It was harder to tell who was more lovely, their men or their women, sometimes I could hardly tell the difference between them. I often looked for their children - girls going with their mothers to market, boys accompanying their fathers to see them do business - but after days and days of search I began to think that any offspring this exquisite race brought forth had all been born long ago, and there would be no more, ever.

We admired them from afar but we did not dare address them. To us they might as well be _malaaikah_ who had flown down from on high and deigned to tread upon the earth. The people of Dorwinion were used to that splendour, perhaps even had a little of it running in their veins, but we were not those people. We stayed away from them as we would stay away from cranes if we were frogs, and they seemed to ignore us as horses ignored lizards. That was what we all thought, anyway, even if we were wrong.

There was one day when I was sitting with Ennia by a little fountain that we both liked on the side of a fairly busy street and with stairs behind it leading up to a higher level on which more buildings were built, sharing a sun fruit between us. Attar was with us, and he was by then comfortable enough in our presence that we shared the fruit with him and he did not grimace when we began to talk of when the baby might quicken and what she might call it. He even loosened the collar of his tunic to dab some cooling water on his neck and merely stared at two maidens who giggled at this sight in such a manner that they quickly hurried on their way. Ennia was asking about whether Kala might have been here in her day, for I had told her all about my teacher's time in the city save for her deeper trouble with the two friends she had left behind. I had just begun to say that Amdír might well have brought her there to tell her stories, for it was comfortable and shady, when I saw a fair one walking right across the street towards us. I stopped talking and stared at him, and I wondered in a stupid way if he actually _was_ Amdír and had overheard us talking about him. Of course it was not possible, it was foolish to think so. There were still many long-life men in the city, what were the chances that this one would be the one from a lifetime ago?

I had managed to keep my mouth shut, and I was rather pleased that I kept it shut still when the fair one stopped in front of us – and it _was _Amdír, I very soon learned, after all my thoughts that it couldn't be – and asked me in our own tongue, very respectfully, how Kala fared, as if he had only spoken to her the day before and had not seen her in the market today and wondered where she was. Kala had never told me what Amdír looked like, why would she have seen any reason to do so? All I could think in the breath I took after he had asked his question was that I did not blame Kala if she would have wanted to lie with him. I couldn't help it. Up close, to deny that he was beautiful would have been to deny that fire was hot or water wet. They just were, as he was.

I was certainly not Kala, and I hardly knew how to talk to someone like Amdír even after all my teaching, so the encounters that I had after that day with him were few and mostly made up of questions. We were in the company of others most of the time; both Alamon and Attar were wary of the interest that was being taken in me and made certain that I was surrounded by my friends. I often did not even look at him because he was beautiful and I was angry again, this time at myself for admiring him and wanting to look at him again and again. I don't know if he had any desire to befriend me at all, really; it was more as if he felt it would be rude of him if, having approached me once, he did not continue to talk with me. Or perhaps it was because I was the only way he could learn what he wanted.

He asked me about her, what had happened to her after she had left Dorwinion and where she had gone, the places she had visited and the things she had done. There were many years to explain, for although she had promised to write to him there had only been a few messages and then none. He told me, in that strange tranquil sing-song way of his that Kala had mimicked so well, that he still kept the letters but that he had never shown them to Turambar.

"What did Turambar do when he learned that she had gone?" I remember asking him. I had honestly wanted to know what had happened to Kala's friends, one who might have been her lover if only she had let him. Most of the people from Kala's past seemed merely like characters in a story to me, even her own mother, but Turambar and Amdír had been more real, standing out perhaps because they were so different from anything else she had told me of. "Was he angry?"

"He was very angry. After accusing me of driving her away, he would not speak to me for many days, months. He wedded his betrothed, but I feared that his marriage might be harmed if he had news of her, so I never told him that she had written to me. I do not think that he could have endured that."

I wanted to know if he was happy or if he had spent his years waiting in vain for Kala to come back. I asked to see him – I did not want to meet him, just to see him. One morning I rose before anyone was awake and met Amdír on the edge of the market in the waking of the Sun, and he took me through the streets to the street corner where we could see a wine merchant's shop. Out of sight of the entrance, we watched an old man open the doors and begin to make all the preparations for the day, fetching out tables and benches with the help of a golden haired young boy who called him grandfather. I asked if that was him and when Amdír said yes I feasted on the sight of the man who had loved my teacher and who might still love her, for all I knew, and on the child that might have been her grandchild. Turambar did not look unhappy, but I remember thinking that he looked older than Kala, for all that he was younger than her. And I remember wondering whether or not I should tell Kala of this, whether I had that right to remind her of the life that might have been.

Amdír stole me away on another day near the end of our time there to walk along the shoreline and talk more, this time about what Kala had taught me in our time together. I think that he quite enjoyed hearing about Kala's ways of making sure I learned things and how she behaved in her position as an important and independent woman; it gave him some kind of peace and he even smiled. And I told him about my mother and my aunts that were my mothers too, since he made no objection. It was good to talk about them and how much I loved them, and how much I missed them. For once he did not ask questions, he merely listened.

We walked so far that we had climbed the southern hill of the city before we stopped to look at the land, as Ennia and Attar and I had done on our first excursion. I made some comment about how lovely the city looked and how I would be sad to leave it, even though I was looking forward to seeing my family again. I looked up at him and, because I knew almost nothing about him even after some hours of talking together, I decided that I would ask him if his family lived here or elsewhere.

He was looking at the water as he replied, "They have gone across the sea."

"They are on our side of the water?"

"No, no…" He shook his head, and turned right about and pointed to the West. "At the edge of this land, far beyond here, the very edge, there is a greater body of water than this, greater than all of the land of this earth put together. My kin have travelled beyond that."

"Will they come back?"

"No."

"But…you stayed." I looked along the line of his arm and thought about a stretch of water larger than the earth. I have to say I could hardly imagine it, but then I thought of our sea but bigger and it made sense, in some way.

"Yes," and when I asked why he said that this sea was his home. Was. He could not have left it then. I told him that I did not think I could leave my mother behind for good at all, or let her leave me; why had his kin left? He looked out on the sea again, and at last he said, "A home, when it is not a home any longer, is just a place. And they could not stay in that place any longer."

"Why did it stop being their home?" It was so strange, these words; as if, having pulled me apart to see what I was made of, he was now bound to answer my desires.

"All things stop being anything in time. And time is all that we have. Time enough to see things that were dear to us change and fade and darken." Now he looked to the South, and even from here in this place of light and divinity we could see a hint of darkness, like the darkness at the corner of the sight of an eye. "To see walls built and reinforced to keep out that which encroaches and taints."

"Not all of my people enjoy the sight of the Shadow." I felt slighted, but I did not move away from him. He looked around at me and I hope that I met his gaze without looking weak. He nodded and did look as if he was sorry for having said it.

"The people of the eastern coast; they are your people. You are a good people, you are not like those from further east."

I reminded him, with some satisfaction at catching him out, that he had befriended Kala too, an 'Easterling' woman; but he claimed that, being an _isha, _she had cast off all association with those who served the One; and then he seemed to remember that my mother and aunts were _ishan _too and asked me how that came to be. If he knew as much about _ishan _as he claimed to then he would know that was not a question to be asked by a man, but my mother had never been ashamed and why should I be?

I had never had a need to before, so it was the first time I had ever told my mother's story and my story, if not fully. Perhaps it was fitting that he was the one I told it to. I sat on the barrier that separated that part of the hill from the part below it and I told him how my mother and aunts had suffered and endured and triumphed. I did not tell him anything about the man in blue so it was not the full story at that time, but it was enough; he brought it closer to being full by telling me the names of the places I described, Dol Guldur, Mirkwood, and telling me who had led the attack on the fortress: fair ones that he called _Eldar_, so ancient that they had lived before the dawning of the Sun!

Then I told him things he could not add to, things that my mother and my aunts had done for me, my life not as my own but as their actions and teachings. Stories, lessons, slaps, kisses, prayers, quarrels, forgiveness, the pinch and the embrace, in the market place and outside the temple, sending for Kala and sending me to her. My training again, but with the words of my mothers that came between.

Amdír seemed to drink it in. He closed his eyes to savour my words. When I had finished he sighed as if he had taken a deep cool draught and been satisfied by it. "When I first saw you, Adahni, I could not help but think of Kala even if it was clear you were not her daughter by blood. Not just because you wore the same robes. You were not her, but you were like her. Your mother…your mothers are the best of the race of Men. They are alight for but a short time, but how they burn. How you burn."

We walked back to the market after that and he took his leave of me, taking my hand even as Alamon glared. I did not think that I would see him again after that, but I was wrong. On the last day when we had packed up whatever wares we had left and were departing he came to the market place again and put a piece of folded paper into my hand, and told me to give it to Kala and that he was glad to have met me in the same breath. If he thought any thing else about me or the one he had written to he said nothing of it. It was a disappointment compared to the storyteller of Kala's tales, but perhaps that was simply Amdír's life by then, disappointment and stagnation in a home that was entrancing but no longer his.

**

* * *

**

In my mind's eye, I see Dorwinion's culture as something along the lines of Constantinople – which is, intriguingly, what Peter Jackson wanted for Minas Tirith – if on a slightly smaller scale, and with a general mish mash of human cultures, Dunedan and Northern with some Elves left in. The Elves themselves are probably another general mish mash of Noldor and Sindar with perhaps more of the latter; I have great trouble keeping track of which group was living where at which point. The nomads are (again) a mish mash of Rohirric blood with Northern stock and some 'Easterling' blood thrown into the mix for variety; think Vikings mixed with Mongols, only they herd sheep and breed horses instead of raping and pillaging and conquering places.


End file.
